Tomatoes
Saving tomato seeds
It’s ripe, it’s perfect and it holds the key to an even better crop next year.
Saving your own tomato seeds each year can save you loads of money and also ensure better growing success year after year.
You can begin to control your tomato crops by selecting seeds from the very best tomatoes on the best performing plants you have. Given that our seasons tend to be a bit short in Vancouver, I like to select my seeds from one of the earliest tomatoes on my best performing plant. Theoretically, this helps ensure your tomato plants set their fruit nice and early the next year.
You can also select for size, colour, fragrance or plant qualities, whatever you like, bearing in mind that you won’t be inventing a new breed of tomatoes any time soon of course.
Here’s what to do:
After you’re done chopping that beaut for your boccocini salad, scoop the seeds that remain on the cutting board into a jar and fill with a bit of water so the seeds are floating. Cover the jar with a coffee filter so some air can get in there. Leave the jar in a warm, out of the way place for 2-3 days. This puppy’s about to get stinky.
Fried Green Tomato BLTs
More green tomatoes. Sigh… well here’s something else you can do with them: Fried Green Tomato BLTs.
This is an adaptation from an Epicurious.com recipe. The original appeared in Bon Appetit, August 2003 and you can find the full recipe here .
I’ve made the epicurious version of this recipe before and it was nice, but a bit fussy to be honest. What I like about BLT’s is the simplicity: bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise on bread. That’s it. No fuckin wilted frisee with feta crust. So here’s my version, for six:
Potato, Po-tat-o, Tomato, To-mat-o
What’s in a name?
Believe it or not, the similarities between potatoes and tomatoes don’t end with the song. They are actually part of the same family- the nightshade, or Solanaceae family- and they are closely related.
This means your tomatoes and potatoes are subject to many of the same diseases and afflictions, like blight.
Did you know that potato blight was the cause of the Irish potato famine in the 1800’s? True story. At the time, some thought it was due to static electricity from locomotives, or mortiferous vapours from a volcano, or divine punishment. Many still hold that it was a result of social, economic and political factors from the ruling English overlords.
I don’t know enough to say really, but I have suspected deadly volcano vapors being at work in my garden before. Or maybe it’s blight. Whatever.
Generally speaking, potatoes like boggy soil and thrive a bit earlier in the year when it’s cooler out. Tomatoes, on the other hand, like to keep their feet dry and thrive in the heat of late summer, so their growing cycles are staggered from one another, depending on the varieties you grow.
Having said this, hopefully you’ve planted your potatoes away from you tomatoes this year, as they are generally considered bad companion plants. It’s like your two warring sisters living next door to one another. You just know a fight’s going to break out sooner or later.
If your tomatoes get nailed with blight this year, your potatoes will be in danger too.
Blossom End Rot
Every so often your parents are right. They show you up, prove you wrong and leave you remembering the good old days when you really needed their guidance. Like, remember that undercut you really wanted in 1992, and dad put his foot down and said no? Well, thanks dad, I owe you one.
This week, mom proved once again that your parents can still be right.
After picking a few ripe tomatoes for a bococcini salad the other night, I came back in the house and cried bloody murder over my blighted-ass tomatoes. I showed her the damage.
“That’s not blight,” she said.
Long pause.
“What?”
“No, that’s not blight. That’s blossom end rot.”
Blossom end rot, as it turns out, is another little problem you’ll run into with your tomatoes this time of year. It looks like a gross black spot on the bottom of your tomato (not the top). This black spot continues to grow on the fruit as the plant develops and becomes thick and leathery in texture.
Blossom end rot is usually caused by infrequent watering. The true cause of the problem › Continue reading
Martha’s Tomato Tart
Bitter, gritty and horrible when fresh, green tomatoes are very sweet when slowly cooked in the oven. This recipe is like a pizza, but without the surly delivery guy or greasy box to hide your shame.
Admittedly, this is a fussy Martha frou-frou recipe and I love-to-hate that bitch. But it’s worth making once a year if you have some time and want to get fancy.
This was featured in the July 2005 edition of Martha Stewart Living- great way to use green tomatoes without frying them.
I’ve got tonnes of flowers but no tomatoes, what the hell?
It’s all about the birds and the bees.
Here’s how it works (don’t laugh): fruit requires pollination to actually produce. You’ve grown a great looking plant, lots of beautiful flowers, and now you’re waiting for the fruit to show. For this to happen, the pollen from your male flowers needs to make it over to the female flowers, if you know what I’m saying.
Normally, bees go from flower to flower throughout your yard collecting pollen to make honey back at the hive. Inevitably, they transfer a bit from one flower to another, thereby pollinating and allowing the fruit to develop. I like to think of bees as the original artificial insemination scientist of nature, but really they’re just pimps looking for some sugar.
Sometimes, this doesn’t always happen though. Why?
Rock n’ Roll fruit of the week: Black Krim Tomato
Rule #1 at the Cracked Pot: any plant, flower, fruit or vegetable that’s black is definitely Rock n’ Roll, and earns a place in the weekly Rock n’ Roll Gardening Hall of Fame.
This week’s winner is the Black Krim Tomato.
This variety is somewhat rare, but becoming increasingly popular with gardeners in Vancouver. It looks like raw meat when you slice it open, and comes from the Isle of Krim in the Black Sea off the coast of the Crimean peninsula in Russia. Did you catch that?
Not only is this tomato black, but it also comes from the Black Sea. Sweet.
This tomato is known as “Czerno Krimski” (Black Krim) in Russian, which sounds super cool if you slur like you’ve had too much vodka. Or maybe you have? If not, maybe you should.
Fried Green Tomatoes
It happens every year. For some reason or another, you wind up with tomatoes that fall off prematurely or that you need to pick while they’re still green.
Green tomatoes suck and you didn’t go to all that trouble just to grow sucky tomatoes, so here’s the good news: there are some awesome things you can make with them, and yes, the famous “fried green tomato” is one of them.
Be sure to share these with a buddy while you contemplate menopause and friendship together.
This recipe is my own adaptation from the one found at epicurious.com.
› Continue reading
My tomatoes are cracking on the bottom, what the hell?
This happened to me this year and I didn’t know what it was. I consulted my mom, and she consulted the Reader’s Digest garden tome for me. We discovered it’s due to infrequent watering. Ooops!
If you see this happening, go water your tomatoes. To prevent, keep watering every 2 days if they are in buckets. They will taste just the same as a regular tomato, but they look kinda freaky- like they’re missing a couple of chromosomes. Butter luck next time, kid.
Tomato Blight
Update: Mom totally schooled me and corrected some info in this posting. I’ve updated the image (borrowed from avrdc.org) and corrected some factual errors below.
The number one problem you might be faced with right now is late season blight.
This darling little disease is a total pain in the ass. If you get it, you’re basically fucked.
What is it? Blight (or bloight if you’re from London) is an airborne fungal disease that thrives in moist, warm conditions.
The spores can remain dormant in the soil over the winter (it lives within plant matter infected by blight from the previous year- like stems, leaves and tubers) then comes back year after year when it gets warm and wet in August. When the rain hits the ground it travels through the air to go fuck with your tomatoes.
Blight will show up looking like a dark brown spot on your fruit, around the stem at the top.
Tip of the week: If there is one thing you do this week, figure out a way to keep the rain off your tomato plants.
Here’s the short and dirty: If your plants get wet, the blight will begin to grow on the leaves first, then travel down the stems and finally arrive on your lovely tomato fruit. At the first sign of infection, you will have to remove anything that is infected and throw it out ASAP to control the disease. This stuff spreads like wildfire.
If you get blight on your tomatoes, you can try cutting off the part that is affected and eat the rest, but don’t eat the part with blight. Ew. Gross. Leper tomatoes.
To prevent blight, here’s what you need to do:
Cracked Pot Pix
