garden therapy » tomato

Late Blight vs.Tomatoes

Stevie — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:54:17 +0000

The race is on. It’s the time of year when you encourage (plead) with tomatoes to ripen before they succumb to the horrors of Late Blight.

It first starts with a few yellowing leaves. Yikes. Remove these right away!

Then a few brown leaves and whitish-grey powder (spores) can be seen. Ack! Remove these immediately! At this point you could also top the plants by cutting the main runnier to prevent more flowering and send the plants energy into fruiting.

Sadly, there will start to be grey-brown spots on the stems which means the race has heated up. Cut off the stems that you can, and if the blight is widespread, begin defoliating the plants to allow all the plants energy into ripening the tomatoes.

It all happens so fast. You can go from lush green plants with many hidden tomatoes (August 2011), to sad looking sticks with ripening fruits (September 2011) in no time as seen in these photos of our raised bed tomato garden and self-watering container tomato garden.

Generally, we win the race and see late blight as a reality of growing tomatoes. Taking the proper precautions in the beginning of the growing season will greatly improve your odds.

Rotate tomatoes to different parts of the garden each year. It takes 3 years for the fungus to leave the soil.
Grow healthy plants: start plants off strong as seedlings, and feed and water them well through the season. Healthy plants are the best defence to disease and pests.
Keep the leaves dry by watering the soil below as opposed to top watering.
Grow plants undercover such as under a greenhouse, plastic dome, or roof overhang.
Wash tools every time you use them, particularly when snipping off the blighty bits.

If you must remove green tomatoes, many can be ripened on a warm windowsill.

When they are ready, those that haven’t been gobbled up fresh, made into sauce or salsa, can be wiped down and frozen whole for a winters’ worth of recipes.

So far blight has taken about 5 of our tomatoes, out of the hundreds that we have harvested off 40 plants. Take that, Blight.

It’s Canning Season

Stevie — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:01:42 +0000

It’s that time of year again that keeps my hands and my senses overloaded. I hoard fresh produce when I see it at a market or farm, or by climbing my neighbour’s trees like a squirrel and collecting way to0 many figs, or by diving deep into the wild blackberry brambles for fresh blackberries. I can’t help it. It’s a compulsion.

Here are a few photos of the harvesting frenzy for the last full week of August. How can you blame me for stocking up?

Figs are abundant again on my neighbours tree although not as much as they were last year. I made balsamic, fig, & rosemary preserves, dried figs in my dehydrator, and plan to make whole figs in a balsamic syrup.

I picked up pickling cukes at a farm this year for the first time and they are pickling away in my dining room.

My secret blackberry picking spot was loaded this year so I made blackberry pie, blackberry jam, blackberry & blueberry jam, and froze some for baking and ice cream.

The tomatoes are staring to come in as well, some of which have seen dehydrated, others made into sauce for the winter.

Any other squirrels out there stocking up for the winter?

The First Tomatoes

Stevie — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 21:51:26 +0000

It’s not much of a harvest but with our cold rainy summer at least it’s something: our first bowl of mixed heirloom tomatoes. They are mainly Tumbler, but there are a few Orange Cherry and Golden Rave (a 2-bite yellow Roma). Hoping for more next week!

Harvest Report

Stevie — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 06:01:14 +0000

There has been so much that has needed harvesting with the cool and super wet weather that we have been having that I just can’t keep up with it all. This is a collection from my home garden and my community garden plot: many tomatoes, fairy tale eggplant, leeks, small wonder spaghetti squash, zucchini, a baby cinderella pumpkin, and hops from the community plot (what the heck am I going to do with the hops???)

I also needed to pull out some carrots from the home garden before the dreaded rust fly burrowed in.

And I’ve been pulling beets for almost 8 weeks now, whenever we want them for dinner.

Needless to say our dinner plates have been very colourful the past few weeks!

Green Zebra Tomato

Stevie — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 15:28:01 +0000

Heirloom Tomatoes

Stevie — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 03:27:34 +0000

Today I went to Tomato Fest at the Trout Lake Farmer’s Market to buy my heirloom tomato ‘seeds’ for next year. The vendors sell tomatoes, not tomato seeds in packets, but really, a tomato is just a delicious and colourful packet filled with of lots and lots of seeds, right? And heirlooms have grown true seed to fruit year after year, so what better way to decide what tomatoes you want in your garden the next year: buy some heirlooms tomatoes, scoop out the seeds, and chow down. If it’s a good tomato – grow more! If it sucks, then just toss the seeds in the compost.

These are the ones I’ll be testing and saving over the next few days to see which will join my most favourite of all heirlooms (some of those favs snuck into the photo even though they came from my garden: Green Zebra, Sweetheart Grape and Siletz). All this for $8.50. Hell yeah!

It seems crazy to BUY more tomatoes when this is the giant bowl I am trying to cope with today from my home garden (this is a really, really big bowl):

Ah, well, I’m sure I’ll find SOMETHING to do with them all….om nom nom nom nom..

First Harvest of September

Stevie — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 17:49:21 +0000

It’s harvest season. There are piles of produce filling my fridge, tabletop, counters, bootroom and basement. I have bags and bowls and boxes of fresh food overtaking the house, overflowing the allotted foodstuff spaces, making it so I need to step over it all to just get through a doorway. It’s definitely harvest season.

Here is what I’ve harvested from my community garden and home gardens. While I don’t grow a lot of any one thing, I grow a few of a lot of things. Over 100 varieties of edibles making this definitive season of plenty.

From my community garden plot:

Potatoes: Red Chief, mystery white variety

Tomatoes: Black Russian and La Roma
Beans: Kentucky Wonder Brown, Kentucky Wonder Wax, Fortex Filet, Orca, and Purple Peacock
Grapes

Mammoth Melting Sugar Snow Peas (the last of them this week due to powdery mildew taking over)
Beets: Detroit Supreme, Red Ace, Chioggia, and Golden
Squash: Small Wonder spaghetti, yellow spaghetti, Little October pumpkins

From my home garden:

Tomatoes: Siletz, La Roma, Green Zebra, Red Zebra, Sungold Cherry, Sweetheart Grape, Isis Candy, Gold Nugget, Patio, and Moneymaker. I recently saw a recipe for roasting them in a dutch oven and now I have one on my kitchen gadget wish list along with a food strainer for making roasted tomato sauce.

Green onions
Italian Prune Plums
Beets: Detroit Supreme, Red Ace, Chioggia, and Golden

Fairy Tale eggplant
Basil: Organic Sweet Basil, Thai Basil
Peppers: Filius Blue, Thai Dragon, and Garden Salsa
Aunt Molly’s ground cherries

Wild arugula and lettuce
Rainbow chard
Soybeans

I took some time this week to reflect on this abundance and the colder months to come. While the days are long and busy now, I’m growing as tired as my plants are from a healthy growing season. But the glut of produce is available now to enjoy. The rainbow of colours and fresh flavours will soon be a fond memory so I best savour this season. With these thoughts I planted my winter seeds and regained my energy for picking and packing away summer’s bounty.

thanks to Daphne’s Dandelions for hosting another wonderful Harvest Monday.

Harvesting in Early August

Stevie — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 03:59:20 +0000

This month my neighbours and I have more growing than we can harvest and eat so there is quite a bit of food sharing going around. Almost daily I get a delivery of somthing, like a giant bowl of fresh figs, that I turn into some lucious creation. I have also now organized a farm fresh egg delivery in my city neighbourhood and been out picking wild berries – all making for a crazy first few weeks in August.

I’m currently harvesting the following veg from my home garden and the community garden plot:

Beans: Purple Peacock, French Filet

Peas: MammothMelting Snow Peas

Tomatoes: Black Russian, Siletz, Sweetheart Grape, Gold Nugget Cherry, Sungold Cherry, Isis Candy Cherry, Red Zebra, Tumbler

Sema Fino Florence Fennel

Beets: Detroit Supreme, Red Ace, Chioggia, and Golden

Chard: Rainbow, Fordhook Giant, Rhubarb

Peppers: Filius Blue, Garden Salsa

Basil: Organic Sweet Basil, Thai Basil

Squash: one Gold Nugget was ready at the community garden

Potatoes: Red Chief, French Fingerlings

All this has made for some interesting recipes like carmelized figs, fig ginger jam, walnut pesto, and mixed veggies ragu. I’ll be sure to share very soon. If I can get out of the kitchen long enough. help.

Harvest Monday: The First Tomatoes

Stevie — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:27:24 +0000

This week the first slicer tomatoes ripened suddenly. I grow these Siletz organic seeds because they are dependably early on the coast and will withstand cooler temperatures so they can be set out in April. They are nice tidy shrubs with about 8-12 large tomatoes each ripening right now, and hopefully a long and productive season ahead. I have 3 plants at the house and one at the community garden plot.

The toms were amazing with fresh basil and some olive sourdough I made from my starter.

There are many peppers ready to be eaten green (or purple as with the Filius Blue peppers), some are picked to encourage more flowers, and the others will get left to allow the peppers to turn red and spicy.

There are still lots of blueberries on the shrubs out front, and now that I have divided my yellow alpine strawberries into a lot more room, I’m getting heaps of those as well (thanks for the advice, Laura!) And with all the kale growing at the community garden, I just had to have more kale chips.

I thinned out a bunch of small beets this week for both the sauteed greens and the roots. I’m growing at least 4 types this year: Detroit Supreme, Red Ace, Chioggia, and Golden.

It has also been a big week for flower harvests. With so many cutting blooms growing, my house is filled with colour both inside and out. The crocosmia below is one of my favourites – both the firey orange crocosmia and the larger upright lucifer crocosmia look just a good indoors as outside from my hammock.

Sausage and Tomato Orzotto

Stevie — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 03:32:46 +0000

I call this orzotto because it’s a creamy risotto-type dish. It’s as fast and easy as it is delicious.

Ingredients:

4 fresh Italian sausages
2 cups dry orzo (I use kamut but whole wheat would be great too)
3 cloves garlic – crushed
4 cups cherry tomatoes
1 cup sliced pitted green olives
1 cup green beans
Olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Fresh parmesan

Directions: Put a large pot of water on the stove for the orzo and set to high.

Add garlic and olive oil into a heavy bottomed skillet and set on medium high until sizzling. Add whole cherry tomatoes (I used the frozen ones from my summer harvest and put them right in frozen), chopped green beans and the sliced olives. Simmer until the juices release and ‘pop’ the cherry tomatoes with a wooden spoon. Score sausage casings and add sausages whole to the pan. Reduce heat to medium low, cover and let simmer.

When the orzo water is boiling, make orzo according to package directions. Cook until el dente—do not overcook. When sausages are cooked through, remove from pan and set aside to rest. Drain orzo and ladle into the skillet. Stir over low heat until the liquid gets absorbed into the pasta. Add salt, pepper and olive oil to taste.

To serve, ladle orzotto into a pasta bowl and grate fresh parmesan over top. Slice the sausage and serve over the orzotto. Serves 4.

Summer's Tomato Bounty