Talking about tomatoes, part 2 - March 2015

Tomato season is coming to an end, so I want to quickly jot down some notes here to refer back to next season. We had a great summer but the tomatoes took a while to really get going, especially the outside ones, so next year I will need to think twice about whether it's even worth planting them outside - perhaps just the tried and true varieties. (Oh who am I kidding, I always have too many seedlings and I'm not going to just throw them out, am I?) Anyway... when you are picking that sweet, savoury, juicy, delicious fruit and putting it straight into your meal (or your mouth), you forget all the challenges and it all becomes worth it.

Tomato notes - glasshouse

• The caterpillars were slow arriving but they did come at last. Not as bad as previous years.
• Tomatoes succumbed to blight at the end of the season as usual, but fruit not affected.
• I usually like to make my own fertiliser from comfrey but I just couldn't be bothered this year. I also had a bag of Tui Novatec to try, which did a good job.

Tomato notes - outside

• Tomatoes outside were much slower to flower and ripen. The plus side is that they are continuing after the glasshouse ones have finished.
• The best performers are Juliet and Kumato... the rest really aren't worth the trouble.
• For fertiliser I used Novatec, sheep pellets, compost and neem granules (for pest repellant).

Tomato varieties

• Juliet - always reliable. First to ripen, prolific. Firm skin and fruit, not really the best texture but they store really well, and fallen fruit don't tend to rot and will continue to ripen.
• Brandywine - same growth habits as other beefsteaks. Nice flavour, but didn't beat my favourite Black Krim!
• Brown Berry - Prolific cherry tomato with nice flavour.
• Black Cherry - slightly more pink/maroon than Brown Berry, otherwise very similar.
• Black Krim - didn't set a huge amount of fruit this year but I think that's normal for beefsteaks? As the fruits they do set are so big. My favourite sandwich tomato!
• Yellow Pear - the slowest to get going, but good once it did. Doesn't set quite as much fruit as the other cherry tomatoes.
• Green Grape - I remember this one being fussy when I first started growing it, but I've been saving my own seeds for several years so I must have kept the good ones! They have chartreuse skin and green flesh with a lovely sweet taste. 
• Kumato - this was the wild card this year and it's proved itself. It did ok outside and would have been even better in the glasshouse. Medium size, brownish maroon fruits with firm skin. They had a nice smoky flavour and were good in sandwiches, also the firm skin meant it was easy to remove when blanched, so they are good for making sauce/relish. I've saved seed and am looking forward to trying it again next year.

I've been gorging myself on fresh tomatoes, in sandwiches and salads, on toast and mixed into almost any dish I've cooked! I made a batch of relish and several batches of semi dried cherry tomatoes in the dehydrator. I dry them for about 8 hours so there is still some moisture in them, then pack them into bags and freeze them. They are a treat in winter.

Sun dried tomatoes recipe

 Here's the easy recipe for my sun dried tomatoes. Disclaimer - they aren't actually dried in the sun! You could do that I'm sure (in fact I've read that you can leave them in your car on a hot sunny day) but since I happen to have a dehydrator I do it that way. You could also use your oven.

Get as many cherry tomatoes as you can find and slice them about 8mm thick. (If you just cut them in half there will be more flesh and they will take longer to dry.) Put them in a bowl or plastic bag with 1 tsp salt, 1 tbsp dried (or a bit more fresh) oregano, 2 cloves minced garlic, 2 tbsp oil, 2 tbsp caster sugar, and toss to coat. (Don't throw away the flavoured oil... it is great for a stir fry base or for frying up eggs and bacon and tomatoes!)

Spread the tomato slices on a dehydrator or oven tray and dry at 60C. I put mine on at about 6pm and left them overnight, so probably about 14 hours. Check them after about 10 hours, you may find that some pieces have dried and the rest need a few more hours.

To store I just put them in a ziplock bag and freeze. They defrost quickly, or you can speed things up by running them under hot water. Enjoy a little piece of summer in salads, pasta, sandwiches and pizza in the depths of winter.

Tomatoes and garlic

 

Sorry to keep you all in such suspense with this, I know you were dying to know. The first tomato of the season was... Juliet! Harvested on 30 Dec. I do like this variety - it is F1, so obviously bred to be reliable. It has lots of fruit which are a quirky oval shape. They are sweet and firm and, most importantly, quick to ripen!

 Quickly following up were Brown Berry. I may have picked one before I left - can't quite remember - but I definitely picked them when I was home on the 7th of Jan. They are tasty little cherry tomatoes, but not too sweet (I'm not really that fond of super sweet tomatoes). And they ripen quickly too, yay.

This is Sunset's Red Horizon, which I thought would be the first pickings. I guess the size of the fruit is what's taking them so long to ripen - they are about the size of cricket balls now. Not far off tasting though!

  

Here is the garlic harvest, dug up on 27 Dec. I let it dry in the sun for several days and then plaited it using Gillybean's tutorial. 

 Then I hung it on my trellis to dry some more. ♥! I saved the five biggest bulbs for seed for next season and put them in a plait of their own. There's also a little plait of bulbs I had left over... the big one was getting unwieldy! Next time, I'll add flowers.

December ramblings

I've been meaning to post here for a while. I've even had these photos uploaded for several days. But I've been rather busy and tired, and I've had to have early nights because it's getting hard to pull myself out of bed in the mornings. We are shifting to a new location for work this weekend (after being displaced by the earthquake), so a final weekend of hard yards is required and then no more double bus trips! No more getting out of bed before the breakfast radio hosts have even come on air! No more cold, rattly, stuffy, poky, inconvenient work building. Hooray!

So, here's the potager in the early morning light a couple of weeks ago. No, I still haven't laid that last brick path. Potatoes are growing madly in the foreground and you can see the tomato stakes over by the shed.

At the moment I'm harvesting broccoli, rocket, lettuce, pak choi, peas, strawberries, potatoes, various herbs and spring onions. Annoyingly I had to buy a punnet of spring onions to plant out, as I forgot to sow seeds in time to replace the ones I've just about finished harvesting. I got into such a good pattern last autumn, but over winter they all slowed down and came ready all at the same time and I was too busy picking them to think about sowing them. I've let a few go to seed so I'll have some more to sow later.

This is the first potato harvest! It doesn't look like much but I was thrilled with it. These are Heather. I sneaked these out from under a few different plants as they started flowering - apparently this is known as "bandicooting". I'll wait till the flowers die down before I harvest the rest - in the meantime the Swifts are ready.

In the glasshouse the tomatoes are working hard. This is Sunset's Red Horizon. The photo is out of date already - the fruit are probably about the size of golf balls now. Still stubbornly green though. Most of the glasshouse tomatoes now have green fruit. Sunset is in the lead, followed by Arctic, and Amazon Chocolate is growing a big mutant fruit formed from several flower heads.

This cute heart shaped strawberry was fun to eat, but makes me a little sad now. I have strawberries in baskets in the glasshouse, and I also had baskets in a wire plant stand outside the front door. Someone stole the plant stand, and the strawberry baskets, on Saturday night. I went out to water them the next morning and they were gone. Nothing else was taken - not the potted blueberry bush, any other pot plants, or the wooden chair - which makes me think it was planned. Someone had probably walked past, seen the strawberries and decided to come back later and help themselves. The planter was top heavy, so they would have had to remove the baskets to carry it out. The fact that it was so obviously deliberate really annoys me... I would almost rather have found the baskets spilled on the ground, then I could put it down to some drunken idiot rather than a cold, calculated thief. It also annoys me that I can't have pretty things outside my front door (which is set back quite far from the street), without some loser thinking they have the right to just come along and take them. There's obviously a plant klepto on the loose in my neighbourhood... maybe it's time for me to get a dog, or some killer chickens!

Tomatoes

I just did a count up of all my tomato plants and I've got 23. Eight in the garden, seven in the glasshouse and the rest waiting to be transplanted somewhere there is room.

In the glasshouse are Black Krim, Juliet, Amazon Chocolate, Brown Berry (x2), Arctic and Sunset's Red Horizon.

Arctic is a cool-weather variety supposedly bred for the US military, to bear fruit in extremely cold climates. I've grown it before and it does ok, but not as well as I'd expect given that description! Sunset's Red Horizon is new to me this year, an heirloom variety from Bristol Seeds with "proven resistance to frost, blossom end rot and cracking". I like to plant at least one cool weather variety in case we have a cold spring. This year it's been warm and sunny, but even so Sunset is growing taller and producing flowers earlier than any of the others. Sunset and Arctic are the only 2 to have tiny green fruit so far.

Black Krim is a yummy beefsteak type that I've grown before and I love the flavour. The skin is a dark reddish black colour. Amazon Chocolate (also from Bristol Seeds) is also a beefsteak with a "winey, smokey, delicious taste".

Juliet is an F1 variety that I've grown before. It's a steady and reliable fruiter. The fruits are small to medium, oval shaped and very tasty. Brown Berry is also from Bristol Seeds (I like to try at least one new variety every year, so everything from Bristol Seeds is new to me this season), it's a cherry tomato, supposedly vigorous and yielding large crops. Semi-sweet, rich flavours and very juicy. I'm not sure how tall the plants will grow so I've staked them just in case, but I have noticed they look a bit more compact and bushy than the others.

In the garden I have Black Krim x2, Amazon Chocolate, Brown Berry x2, Juliet, Sunset, and Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln (Bristol Seeds) was limited stock and strictly limited to one packet per order, so I had to try it. Anything that limited must be good right? The description says, "High lycopene. Faithfully produces huge crops of meaty fruit." Another beefsteak I suppose. The reason I only have one in the garden and none in the glasshouse is that only one seed (out of 4) germinated, and it grew so slowly that it wasn't ready for potting on when I did all the glasshouse plants. It's catching up now though, so it will be interesting to see what it does.

Also in the glasshouse and just about ready to be transplanted out are another Amazon Chocolate, and some "bite size" varieties which I bought as seeds on sale at Bunnings: Green Grape, Yellow Pear and Red Fig (x5... must be a vigorous one). This afternoon when it cools down a bit I'll find somewhere to poke them in. I've got some pumpkin seedlings that need to go out too.

What tomato varieties are you growing this year?