It’s not the waste it seems! At a distance, they may look whole, but they’re not. Most of this 100lbs (45kg) of tomatoes are well split or explosively squishy and really not worth reclaiming as gallons of sauce. Given the delicate nature of heirlooms, and the pumping up with moisture from the recent rains, split toms are an unfortunate fact of garden life. For this harvest, we got maybe three good ones for every reject. Not bad. Then, we made every attempt to find the unfortunate ones homes, selling off and even giving away big bags towards the end of the market day. At the house, putting up sauce is already ongoing, and there will be at least a couple of hundred pounds more available for canning around frost. There’s just nothing else I can think of to do with these! And so, to the compost heap…
tomato
Share of the week
A specially Thursday-picked Large share, tiny farm flexibility in action for a shareholder who missed the weekend pick-up. A Large is about one and a half the size of the standard Single share. This week: carrot (Touchon), beet (Golden Detroit, Scarlet Supreme), tomato (assorted heirloom), mesclun (9-lettuce), spring onion (Ramrod, Red Baron), summer squash (Sunburst, Golden Dawn III, Ambassador), potato (Gold Rush), pepper (Ace), onion (Stuttgarter), garlic (Music). The shares have been pretty good this year, not over the top (in a superabundant way) as they have been at times in the past, but definitely solid value for the fresh, local, organic dollar!
More from the Market
Today’s wares set up behind the stand at the farmers’ market. First thing in the morning (that’s around 7 am), we open and arrange all of the crates and use them to stock the stand and assemble CSA shares. Here, we’re partway into the morning—as the day progresses, crates get stacked. Visible in the pic, an assortment of mainly heirloom tomatoes, carrots, assorted sweet peppers (we picked a lot of ’em green before turning to red rather than let them shrivel in the near-drought conditions), various beets, garlic, and green and yellow beans pre-packed for the CSA. As for the traffic, the day was on the quiet side, despite great weather—it seems the fresh, local, organic trend so pumped in the media this year, and apparently somewhat sweeping the cities, is taking its time hitting the countryside. All in all, though, a decent Saturday!
Cherry tomatoes
Life imitates…candy! Picking cherry tomatoes may take forever, but it’s totally worthwhile for both looks and taste. This is newer tiny farm thinking for me. In my concern for quantity, having enough every week for market and CSA shares, I tended to favor things that grew BIGGER. Kinda primitive-practical (and I’m still biased against baby veggies, like tiny scallopini squash—just give ’em a couple more days, no?! :). Only last year, I finally expanded the cherry selection from a couple of standard round, red varieties to a fair mix of heirlooms and modern hybrids. Today’s assortment includes Golden Cherry, Red and Yellow Pear, Ildi, Red Currant, Chadwick’s Cherry, Matt’s Wild Cherry, and Sweet Baby Girl. There’s supposed to be Green Grape in there, maybe they were passed over because they didn’t look ready to pick!
Tomatoes
Taking a break during a drizzle (it’s not RAIN, and I doubt it’ll turn into it either), I piled up a few leftovers from Friday’s tomato harvest. The mid- and main-season toms aren’t yet ready, so we picked what we could, and didn’t keep track amongst the 50+ varieties. Still, I can recognize most of ’em. There are smaller and larger heirloom Striped Germans (yellow with a beautiful red blush), the large round one in front is Polfast, a new early hybrid that isn’t behaving that early, the smaller reds are Stupice, there are a couple of red cherries, sliding in on the left is Tangerine, and more… Notably absent are the black tomatoes (Cherokee Purple, Black Krim and the others), with their distinctive deep green to earthy red coloring—the few that were ready were sold or eaten! The little yellow cherry tom nestled in the middle on the left was actually given to me yesterday at the market; called Garden Peach, it has a fuzzy peach-like texture, and great taste (I had a couple!). If I can’t find it in the catalogs, I’ll save the seed and hope for the best.
Supporting tomatoes
Time is tearing by, and there’s still lots more tomato-supporting work to be done, but it’s coming along. The good thing about my for-now semi-sprawl method is that it can be done reasonably effectively quite far along. The toms are indeed starting to really sprawl, but we still have a week or so when pulling them up is fairly easy and it will keep the paths clear and the fruit off the ground. Off course, stringing them together from both sides does make for a dense mass of tomato plant, but a bit of quick pruning and it’s better all around than without! We’ll see for sure over the next few weeks of tomato harvest…
Dinner!
After a fairly lazy day in the field, half of it spent waiting for the ground to dry out a bit after an intense thunderstorm (only 15mm, though), it was off to a farm a couple of miles down the road to get some local rainbow trout for dinner. Then, a quick tour of the garden to pick the fixin’s: new potatoes (Norland, Yukon Gold), yellow and green beans (Indy Gold, Derby), summer squash (Sunburst, Flying Saucer…yes, FS), beet greens (mainly Detroit Dark Red). Nestled in by the beans, the first tomato to turn color, a Stupice, of course, not quite ready to munch, but only days away! And so, except for salt, pepper, olive oil and butter, your basic local dinner!