Planting Tomatoes like Trees

We have moved quickly from a glut of summer squash in June to a glut of tomatoes in July. Actually, a lot of different vegetables came to the table in July. We have already managed to get tired of corn on the cob. When I realized what my wife (i.e. chief cook) was doing, the first thought to pop into my mind was “cop out soup”. I had brought in new potatoes, onions, peppers, corn, green beans, the last of the summer squash, and tomatoes. I thought we had an understanding that since she was now retired, she would be willing to process my garden produce… but like to tango, it takes two to have an understanding. She had decided to “make soup” and everything along with beef and broth was going into one super-sized slow-cooker crock pot. She was killing seven birds (vegetables) with one stone by making soup. To me vegetable soup is something you make and eat in winter.  Anyway, it turned out I was surprised; with a tall glass of iced sweet tea on one side and a plate of cold salted watermelon on the other, a bowl of black peppered vegetable soup actually was a very satisfying summer meal …correction, a whole week of  savory summer meals, since she had made so much. We froze some of  it.                                                                                                    Getting back to the tomatoes, I planted some Celebrity variety tomatoes, a truly prolific hybrid, to use as a standard of comparison for several heritage tomatoes. Someday I want to find a really good heritage tomato and be able to save my own seed. In general, hybrids (of which Celebrity is one of the best) are considered to have better disease resistances and be more prolific, i.e. more tomatoes per plant, whereas the heritage varieties have better flavor. I started off by planting all the tomatoes like I had seen directions for planting young trees…in large holes. I skimmed off the ryegrass cover crop and laid that turf to one side. Next I dug out the hole to a depth of over a foot and two feet in diameter, chopped some of last year’s tree leaves into the bottom, and then replaced the  ryegrass sod inverted grass-side down into the hole to act as a sponge and hold water for the roots when the August drought came.  I added a good soil/compost mixture with a handful of bone meal thoroughly mixed in. I left the top three inches of the hole unfilled so I would have a convenient watering basin. I stripped all but the top leaves off the transplants and planted the stems horizontally with only the top leaves above ground. I put a cage over the transplants and that was it. I believe the bone meal really did the trick because we had many large (hand-size) green tomatoes.

                The Cherokee Purple heritage tomato did not compare well on my soil to the Celebrity hybrid. The Cherokees were large but very gnarled and knobby, tended to have rot spots (most ended up on the compost pile) but did have a somewhat better flavor than the hybrid. I won’t try Cherokee Purple next year, maybe Green Zebra instead.

                I planted a heritage Chocolate cherry in front of the old Amish heritage Brandywine thinking that a cherry tomato would have a small vine. Small tomato, small vine…WRONG! The Chocolate cherry (also called black cherry, I believe) had good flavor, better than the Celebrity hybrid; the tomato was about golf ball-size and there were a gazillion of them…definitely the most prolific output of the varieties. The huge vine was very invasive, covering much of the Brandywine despite the fact that there was a two-foot space between the cages. Still the Brandywine produced large well-shaped and good old- fashioned tasting flavorful tomatoes. The chocolate cherry was early ripening and the Brandywine was quite late to ripen. Since I am into organic gardening, I try to pick all the large tomato varieties either opaque green or at first blush of red and wrap them in newspaper to ripen in the house. If allowed to vine ripen, some grasshopper or stinkbug will take a bite and rot will set in. Greenness is the tomatoes own defense against most insects (but not the horned tomato worm). I am interested in giving Brandywine another try next year.

                Because I was comparing several types of tomatoes, we ended up with a glut; what do you do with all those tomatoes? Fried green tomatoes are delicious in June. We eat a lot of BLT’s and fried ham and cheese sandwiches with big slices of red tomatoes, tuna salad with tomato slice and also toasted cheese, mayo and tomato in July.  Tomatoes make a good side dish just salted and peppered. Green tomato pie really does taste like apple pie. If all else fails, MAKE SOUP!

Between Asparagus and Tomatoes

                “What do you do with a drunken sailor?” As I looked out into my June garden, the melody of that old song kept running through my brain, but the lyrics had changed to “What do you do with a crooked necked squash?” In our garden, June is that culinary in-between month. The asparagus spears are gone to ferns, the spinach and lettuce salad greens have bolted, the radishes have become hot and pithy and we have grown tired of picking from exhausted strawberry plants. On the other hand, July sweet corn, tomatoes, cantaloupes, bell peppers, snap beans, and cabbage slaw are yet to come. True, there are some early new potatoes, Swiss chard for cooked greens, fried green tomatoes, but overall June is mostly summer squash and lots of it. Summer squash is the one plant you don’t want to overplant but you also don’t want to underplant it either. A few years ago, knowing that a couple plants each of zucchini and yellow summer squash would be plenty for our needs, that was all I planted that year, just four plants. Cut worms got every plant. Squash bugs and squash borers are not the only enemies of summer squash. So this year I planted about four plants of each and then thinned out a couple weaklings.

                The sustainability principle of eating what is in season was hitting home this June. It is very easy to pick ten pounds of summer squash per day in June and that much poundage goes a very long way toward feeding a retired couple but after eating just one pound of bland squash on just one day, you are ready to sacrifice the rest of the month’s crop to the garden gods on the compost altar. But as I said, in June, zucchini and yellow summer squash are pretty much all that are producing. This illustrates a second principle: the importance of the cook over the gardener because she can prepare that daily ten pounds of squash in ten different savory ways to make it delectable throughout the entire month. Going online on the internet to choose from the many squash recipes is a good part of her success. Since there are so many recipes on the internet, we will only include a couple favorites at the end of this blog.

                Zucchini was the easier of the two summer squash varieties for us to handle its bounty. For starters we washed and sliced some raw zucchini and used it as “chips” to dip in hummus “dip”. Quick, healthy, low calorie. Some zucchini we also fried in canola oil and served with ketchup, thus reducing our need for fried green tomatoes.  Let a few more tomatoes turn red. Mostly we grated and drained zucchini and then froze them for use this winter to bake everyone’s favorite, zucchini bread.  That bread makes a great (and cheap) winter gift. We baked a number of loaves in June too, but no need to overload the A/C too much. Baking zucchini bread with children and having them participate from garden picking to baking to eating the bread is a great project. So far we have baked around a dozen loaves and put 34 pint bags of shredded zucchini into the freezer.    Oh… where the recipes call for “sugar” use brown sugar instead for better flavor. Again, there are plenty of good recipes for zucchini breads on the internet so just grate, drain and freeze your surplus for later winter baking and you should keep up with garden production. If you let a zucchini grow a little too big and the center becomes seedy and pithy (honestly, they can go from hot dog size to the size of you lower leg overnight) just scoop out the center and use what’s left. DON’T let SOMEONE tell you it is no longer any good and has to go on the compost pile!

                Crooked neck yellow squash is another matter. It is moister and softer and probably doesn't freeze as well, so we felt compelled to eat it in the here and now. My wife made summer squash casserole with a corn meal topping from squash slices and cream of chicken soup. I liked it with hot sauce. She sauteed squash with onions and mixed it with marinara sauce to serve on spaghetti. She also sauteed it with onions and served it in chili; one of my favorites is as a taco filling with cheese, chili and salsa. I've not yet been able to eat just one of those tacos. Still, my most favorite recipe is for summer squash pancakes. We ate some squash pancakes with ketchup and some with syrup. So those are some of the ways we managed to handle our daily onslaught of summer squash in June. Still, I am glad to see July with its more varied garden produce and menu. I am now down to just a single summer squash plant and I will be pulling it shortly to allow melon vines to spread.  I fear another zucchini for the cook and I too might have ended up sacrificed to the garden gods on the compost altar!  A couple squash recipes follow:

Zucchini bread

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

3 teaspoons ground cinnamon

3 eggs

1 cup vegetable oil

2 ¼ cups sugar (can substitute brown sugar)

3 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups grated zucchini

1 cup chopped walnuts (optional- you can leave out nuts or substitute pecans or raisins)

Directions:

1. Grease and flour two 8 by 4 inch loaf pans. (regular size loaf pans)

 (Optional*-After I grease and flour pans, I line bottoms of pans with wax paper.  The bread comes out of the pans easier.

 Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

2. Stir together flour, salt, baking powder, soda, and cinnamon together in a bowl.

3. In another large bowl beat eggs, oil, vanilla, and sugar together.

4. Add dry ingredients to the creamed mixture and beat well.  Stir in zucchini and nuts until well combined.  (Dough will be stiff)

Pour batter into prepared pans.

5. Bake for 40-60 minutes (I usually bake it 60 minutes or until toothpick or butter knife inserted in bread comes out clean)

Cool in pan on rack for 20 minutes.

Remove bread from pan and completely cool loaves before wrapping.

Squash Pancakes

 2 cups grated summer squash or zucchini

2 eggs, slightly beaten

2 T chopped green onion

½ cup flour

¼ c grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

¼ cup vegetable or canola oil, or as needed

1. Drain grated squash and press out excess liquid.

2. Stir squash, eggs, and onion in a large bowl.

3. Mix flour, Parmesan cheese, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl; stir mixture into squash mixture until batter is moistened.

4. Heat oil in large skillet over medium-high heat.  Drop  by rounded tablespoonfuls of batter in hot oil; fry until golden ( about 2-3 minutes each side).

5. Drain pancakes on paper towel-lined plate.

Wild Rabbits, Righteous Women, and Potatoes

                Women (i.e. wives, and I don’t want to mention any specific name but her initials are M.I.N.E.) have this really irritating habit of being habitually right, even though we men/husbands have logic and mathematical precision on our side. My wife was going into town to shop so I asked her to stop by the local nursery and pick me up FIFTY Beauregard sweet potato sprouts. Logically speaking, fifty is the number that I planted last year and the year before, and that number had perfectly served our own needs through the previous two winters and still allowed us to give a few away to the kids. Mathematically speaking, in March I had gone out and dug under rye grass cover crop and made a total of fifty feet of sweet potato ridges in three separate rows; I planned to plant slips one foot apart. 50X1=50. When my wife came home with 75 slips, rather than create a major row over a minor issue (i.e. choose your battles wisely), I just muttered under my breath about it “being a waste of money” and now I was going to have to “find a place to fit them” into my already preplanned garden space. I felt justified in my grumbling because logic and mathematical precision were afterall on my side. I was a little peeved and she returned the favor due to my ingratitude for her having shopped for me.

                Enter the plague of wild rabbits into the picture and my garden. I had bought some short fencing from one of the major box stores thinking it was designed specifically to keep critters out of vegetable gardens. I thought 2’x4’ weave would stop the rabbits, but they can run right through it without even changing pace. My garden became a rabbit sanctuary. And the one plant they loved above any other was sweet potato leaves. By the time I got some semblance of control with spraying soapy water on the sweet potato vines to change their flavor for the bunny palate, a third of the plants were eaten. Her 75 slips ended up being my 50; She was right on despite my logic and mathematical precision. And, yes…it is really irritating!

                While we are on the subject of “potatoes”, they (both white and sweet) form the backbone of my “Plan B” garden. Plan A is just using your income from job or retirement nest egg to go purchase groceries from the grocery store, i.e. living the American dream. Plan B assumes that hard times come a knockin’ and we like much of the rest of the planet are forced to live a more vegetarian existence relying on our small garden produce. Plan B assumes that western drought causes irrigation reservoirs in central California and Texas graze lands to dry up, skyrocketing the price of produce and beef. (Like that could ever really happen!) To the western drought and wild fires throw in several major hurricanes on the Florida peninsula and gulf coast. Plan B assumes that there might be a major financial crisis, another Great Depression, with banks failing, large corporations going bankrupt and many workers unemployed. (Like that could ever happen in America!) Plan B assumes that in order to stop bleeding red ink, the Federal Government reduces Social Security, Medicare, Welfare and Food Stamps. (Like aren’t we entitled to our entitlements whether the government has money to pay for them or not!) So despite the probability that a need for a plan B garden will never occur and Plan A will continue to function just fine, I went ahead and expanded my vegetable garden to include a Plan B section about 25’x50’. Even if there is no catastrophe, it is still a good skill to learn and should reduce our grocery bill.

                As I said, potatoes are the backbone of the Plan B garden. I planted two twenty foot rows Yukon Gold in mid-March as my early potato and harvested them in late June to make room for a second crop in their area, probably fall carrots and keeper beets. Yukon Golds are delicious to the point that my wife will not let me not plant them. These harvested Yukon Gold potatoes should get us through a good part of the summer. In mid-March I also planted two twenty-foot rows of Red La Soda potatoes which are much more prolific and suited to hot summers and sandy soil. These main crop potatoes will be harvested in late August and their area replanted to turnips for a fall crop. I will also plant some over- wintering spinach to harvest next spring. The Red La Soda should provide us with a healthy carbohydrate through the fall and early winter. The sweet potatoes on the opposite end of the garden will be dug in early October and will be our main carbohydrate in late winter through till next June when the Yukon Golds again come in. So the two white potatoes are on one end of the garden and sweet potatoes on the opposite end. Since whites and sweets are from two totally different botanical families, I think I can get away with rotating them end for end.

                In the ten-foot center of the garden between the sweets and whites on either end, are 12 “holes” that I have dug out to over a foot deep and filled  half-full with inverted rye grass sod and then added several inches of compost and soil mixed with bone meal for phosphorus. After being thus filled each “hole” still has a large basin/depression to hold water.  Eight of these holes have wire cages over them. Six of the caged holes are planted to varieties of tomatoes and two to cucumbers; a couple uncaged holes are planted to bell peppers (3 or 4 to the hole), two more are planted to zucchini. As an experiment, I’ve planted spring cabbages around the base of the tomatoes. The tomatoes give some shade to the cabbages and (I hope) deter the white cabbage butterfly.  The cabbages shade out the grass at the base of the tomatoes.

                Along the back of the garden is a 3-foot wide, 50-foot long bed of onions which I harvest as needed during the summer and then dry and store for winter. I plant 20-foot double rows of bush green beans at about three-week intervals through the summer, so I am always harvesting snap beans but never too many. Snap beans, sliced bell peppers and shredded zucchini are three items which we freeze for winter use. Since the sweet potatoes are planted in mid-May and then sit around for another month before they begin to spread, there is both time and space between some of the ridges for a springtime salad garden of over-wintered spinach, radishes, and scallion onions planted from sets.

                So there you have the Plan B garden; Soups from root crops in winter, salads and cooked greens with stored yams in spring, summer and fall bounty until frost. Horticulture is the poor man’s agriculture. I hope my wife doesn’t disagree with anything I’ve written because I definitely have logic and mathematical precision on my side.

Grandma Kept It Simple

                During this brutal winter in which “polar vortex” has become a pejorative term, I have had a chance to peruse and enjoy a number of gardening “how to” books. It’s been cozy reading by the fire. Quite a few of those books begin with stories about the authors’ grandmothers (and occasionally grandfathers’) who “came over on the boat” or “out on the railroad.” My sense is that there is a great affinity with grandma and gardening.

                My grandparents lived on one of those 100-acre self-sustaining, self-sufficient farms that still existed in the 1950s of my childhood. On that farm grandma was in charge of the garden. As I read the seed catalogs and “how to” garden books this winter I began to realize there was one major difference between my grandmother’s garden and these books and catalogs. The books are full of types of vegetables and varieties of those types whereas grandma grew only a few types of vegetables, but she grew those few vegetable types very well and in great quantity. In truth in my own little garden, I surely have twice the types of vegetable as she, a seasoned gardener, did.

                In terms of root crops, I only remember her raising two- onions and potatoes…lots of potatoes; I recall going down into her basement with her in winter to get some for a meal from what looked like a wagon-load pile. Besides potatoes, the only other member of the nightshade family in the garden was huge beefsteak tomatoes …no bell peppers, no egg plants. The only member of the cucurbit family she grew was cucumbers…no pumpkin, no summer squash, no winter squash, no melons…just cucumbers.  The seed catalogs and gardening books are full of “greens” and brassica family members. Grandma only grew cabbages but she grew them well and in large number. In the legume family, grandma grew lots of peas and lots of pole beans. I remember the peas because her method of keeping boys out of mischief was having us sit on the porch swing and depod peas for a meal. On the north side of the garden  there was a long permanent row of asparagus plants that we kids thought looked like little Christmas trees…to the west side was a permanent row of Concord grapes. Both of these permanent crops probably also doubled as garden windbreaks. The whole garden amounted to maybe a half acre. There were separate blackberry and sweet corn patches…probably a quarter acre each.  By keeping it simple and specializing in these eleven crops, Grandma was not only able to feed her family, Sunday visitors, my uncle who worked the farm and his large family but she also sold vegetables on her “egg and butter” route through the west side of Evansville. I still recall her weighing out green beans and sweet corn on the spring scale they hung on the back of their black van truck. I recall too that the boxed blackberries were especially popular with the ladies on the peddling route.

                So Grandma grew large quantities of a few vegetables…but that is not my main point. My major point is that grandmas cooking did not seem to suffer from the lack of variety of vegetables; rather there seemed to be a certain seasonal succession to eating. First of all the ‘50s were the meat, potato and gravy days and on the farm plate there was always fried chicken, beef with dark gravy or pork chop with white gravy to go with the ever-present potatoes. There was also some variety in the potato serving since in addition to mashed potatoes, grandma also served them country fried with onions, baked potato wedges with ketchup ( think big French fries), boiled new potatoes, and best of all as German potato salad.  After the potato and meat were on the plate, all that was needed was an in- season side vegetable. The cabbages made wonderful Cole slaws in summer and fall and krauts in winter. In late spring there were asparagus and by early summer peas with baby onions. Next came fried green tomatoes; then came cucumber and onion sweet vinegar salad, followed by tomato-onion sweet vinegar salad, cooked green beans, and sweet corn with butter. Fill in this “seasonal eating” with a little canned corn, canned green beans, some pickles, homemade bread with black berry and grape jams during the week and grandma’s famous baked kuchens and chocolate cakes for the week-end meals and it is easy to see that the lack of variety in the garden did not affect the quality of grandma’s cooking. I never heard anyone complain and I did see Sunday visitors unhitch their belts at the table.

                There is a real marriage between gardening and cooking; learning to grow a few vegetables really well and keeping it simple makes good sense.