The perfect tomato arrives in August in Baltimore. There is nothing that can be done to change that timing. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. The first flush generally comes in all at once — while you’re at the beach. We’ll talk about managing that problem in a few months.
To get the perfect tomato in your garden, planning starts in February if you grow from seed or May if you buy plants. I start all my tomatoes from seed mostly purchased from Territorial Seed Company. They are raised under shop lights on a heat mat in the basement. I become very attached to my seedlings and went so far this year as to name some of them.
This year’s heirloom varieties of choice are: Brandywine; Cherokee Purple; Pineapple; and Kring. Two of each. The selection is based on anticipated flavor. Brandywines are, in my opinion, the best tasting tomatoes of them all. One perfect Brandywine is worth an entire gardening season. Cherokee Purple and Pineapple are added for color and I wouldn’t waste garden space if they didn’t have fine flavor, as well. Kring is saved seed from a friend whose family has had the variety in its garden for generations.
My tomatoes went in the ground last Saturday, a week before Mother’s Day. It’s too late to start a tomato garden from seed, but not to late to order plants or buy them from a local nursery.
Politically, the perfect tomato is grown locally, organically and with open-pollinated seed. Even though I grow mostly heirlooms which fit the politically correct definition, I feel the need to bolster the heirlooms’ limited production with bounty and beauty. Bounty and beauty aren’t the best words to describe an heirloom tomato. Although they look pretty in these photographs.
A lovingly tended, properly placed Brandywine plant with a minimum of 8 hours of sun each day will still only give you about 10 fruits. And they’re not particularly beautiful hanging on the vine. Brandywine, like most larger heirloooms are deep-lobed, but are more pink than red and mine generally have cracked skin around the stem from irregular watering. So, just in case I only get one perfect Brandywine after 8 months of anticipation, I plant some tried and true hybrids — Super Marzano Italian Roma-types and Cherries. That way, come August, while I’m at the beach, my garden is overflowing with tomatoes.
Click any photograph to buy the plant.
I just found this over at Gardenrant, a favorite irreverent gardening blog.The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
. I can’t wait to read it. My $64 Brandywine.
Wed, May 9 2012 » Let the season begin » No Comments
Pansies planted in the fall are vibrant and beautiful. They muddle through the winter, look brilliant in a frost, then come up shining again in the spring only to die in the heat that begins to brutalize Baltimore at the beginning of May. They never seem to retain their full glory for Mother’s Day.
Year after year, I pull pansies from their containers on the patio the week before Mother’s Day to replace them with, well, whatever strikes me. If I had my preference, I’d have pansies all summer. But we know pansies don’t last through the summer. They don’t even last through Mother’s Day.
As I watch the passing of the pansies, I’ve been thinking that the Orioles are a lot like pansies — they don’t usually last until Mother’s Day, either. At least they haven’t for the past 14 years — a splash of excitement in the fall (like last year when they knocked Boston out of playoff contention on the last day of the season) with more color and hopefulness in the early spring (always in first place on opening day), then dead by Mother’s Day.
This year, not so much. Right now, we’re talking O’s in second place in the AL East having just taken two out of three from the Yankees in the Bronx. In the series before that, we beat Oakland two out of three at home. Sunday, the O’s scored five runs in the ninth inning to win. I don’t remember the last time I had such fun listening to a ninth inning broadcast. So, maybe there’s more baseball season to enjoy this year. I can only hope . . . because the Ravens, my favorite powerhouse perennials just lost T-Sizzle for the season.
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn is about the breaking of the color barrier in baseball and what happened to the men who did it.
Tags: baseball, flowers, Orioles
Thu, May 3 2012 » Somewhere over the rainbow » No Comments
Well, maybe not your kids, but this recipe will turn an unwilling adult into a mustard greens eater. The trick is not sugar (but that certainly helps) — the trick is lemon, or lime, or even orange juice.
I found this wonderful recipe on Pinterest — a useful way to browse the web. Quite frankly, I’m not going to type “mustard greens” into Google to see what I find, because I’m not that interested in mustard greens. But then I see someone has pinned a recipe with a note that says, “I must try this.” And I think why? So, I look at their pinboard and I dig down to the original website to see about the person whose recipe it really is. I end up finding very interesting people who have been working at their craft of cooking (in this case) and writing about it for years.
Personally, my only real interest in mustard greens is that I can grow them in my backyard. And I’m not going to dedicate any precious garden space to a crop that no one in the family except me will eat. It’s a plant picking problem. Sort of like a salary cap in football. I’m not going to pay lots of money to a player who is going to sit on the bench. I learned with swiss chard — beautiful, bright rainbow chard which can easily be used as a substitute in this recipe. I had a bountiful production of chard last year — only one of my sons enjoyed chard with me.
The crop selection limitations are severe at my house — beets are not permitted anywhere in the garden. One member of my family (who shall remain nameless) has a fear that the taste of beets will infect all the other vegetables in the garden. I think he is remembering those jellied, canned, tasteless bleeding-red beets his mother served him as a child. But, life is about compromise, so I don’t plant beets. But I might plant mustard greens, or maybe mustard reds.
I bought a bunch to taste at a local community farm — Whitelock Community Farm. The original recipe for Mustard Greens with Balsamic-Glazed Chickpeas can be found at the Fat Free Vegan Kitchen.The only thing I changed in Susan Voisin’s recipe was to finish it with a squeeze of lemon juice. Oh, and I served it with grilled pork tenderloin.
Louise Erdrich tells a wonderful story.
Another one of her books that is a favorite of mine is The Master Butchers Singing Club
.
Tags: planting, salary cap, seed
Sun, April 29 2012 » Let the season begin, Somewhere over the rainbow » 1 Comment
Good things come to those who wait. But that barren patch of dirt is not going to fill up with flowers by itself. One reliable option for difficult locations of the garden is the beautiful Lunaria, or Money Plant, also known as Silver Dollar.
Lunaria has two stages of beauty — the beauty of the bloom and the beauty of the everlasting silvery seed pod. And wait you must for the seed pod display of the Money Plant to fill a vase and grace a corner in your living room or the top of your piano. Lunaria is a biennial. A plant whose life cycle is two years. You plant the seed and the plant grows the first year, it blooms in the second year, then sets its seeds and dies.
I‘ve always wondered about biennials — why would anyone bother to plant a seed and then wait for an entire year for a short-lived flower. Lunaria looks like much of nothing in the first year. It has large, serrated oval leaves in a basic green color — a weedy appearance even. In that first year, it’s pretty much indestructible though — dogs, kids, soccer balls — may dent but not demolish it. 
Then in the second year, a spectacular show begins. Purple, white and pink blossoms atop two foot willowy stems that pass quickly into green seed pods which then dry into a everlasting shimmer. Money Plant reseeds beautifully, so you will be treated to color and light in that beaten patch of garden in years when you least expect it.
So, plant the seeds and wait. . . good things will come.
Tags: flowers, planting
Thu, April 26 2012 » Somewhere over the rainbow » No Comments
Warm breezes, cool white wine and a garden that comes alive with light as the evening sun goes down. That’s a promise with these three easy annuals. It’s all about white flowers. White flowers may not show well during the day, but at night they glow in the dark, creating depth and mystery — they are my White Knights:
All three are easy to cultivate. They germinate quickly and tolerate both wet weather and dry conditions. All three can be started indoors under lights, directly sowed in the ground when night time temperatures are consistently above 55 degrees, or bought from a local nursery when you are ready to plant. I must tell you that these varieties are hard to find in nurseries in white, so the best bet is to start them from seed yourself. And this particular marigold I have never seen available for purchase as a plant.
Placing one or two plants together provides a beacon that will draw all eyes to a hidden corner of your garden. Plant mass groupings of the cosmos or marigolds to fill beds of tulips that have finished their show. Line pathways with the compact zinnias or fill containers with any of these white flower-gems and the luminosity of your backyard will amaze you and your night time guests.
Profusion Zinnias are even more brilliant because they do not need dead heading — the newer blooms grow out to cover the older passing blossoms. Cosmos are elegant with petals like silk in a breeze. And the marigolds have the added benefit of driving pests away from your vegetables.
These flowers are like having a backyard full of teas lights. So, plan now to enhance your evening garden with a magical glow. Light up the night.
Suggested reading to make your white knight even steamier — Black Rose by Nora Roberts. The first book in the In The Garden Trilogy.
Tags: flowers
Mon, April 23 2012 » Dirt in the Skirt » 2 Comments
