Still More Tomatoes Oct 2012

Picked another 6 pounds this week, each one a gift. Heading to the roof now to see what else might be dangling from the withered vines.

At Last, Tomatoes 2012

We snarked and moaned, inundated you with Chicago's early heat stats straight from Tom Skilling's weather center, and just about entirely missed the first round of tomatoes due to the unbelievale heat this summer.

But by virtue of a little good luck, accidental planning, and tenacity--yes, we didn't give up watering the scorched-earth-looking tomato plants--we've had a beautiful tomato harvest over the past eight weeks. I've just been too busy to post about it.

The uber-reliable for our climate

 Stupice

How to describe the joy of finally having enough of this queen fruit to worry about what to do with 'em all? Eight words do it justice: Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter. For my time and effort, this is the easiest and most flavorful sauce to make with a load of tomats. After cutting into chunks this size and letting them cook down, we freeze it.

Mostly we've been returning from the roof with small to mid-sized 'maters. Happily, we planted Glacier, Stupice, Black Prince, Brazilian Beauty, and Crnkovic, the last not small by any stretch but early and clearly good for the long haul (the plant looked devastated two weeks ago but was loaded with large maturing fruit). What Bountiful Gardens says about Brazilian Beauty:

Forty years ago, Gordon Brown was at a nursery when a hippie van full of tomato plants pulled up. All the tomatoes were rare types from Brazil, and they were for sale. The nursery owner didn’t want them, so Gordon bought some, and this variety was the standout. He’s kept it going to this day, a rare and unbelievably tasty tomato. Unusual, mahogany color with green shoulders. Very good yields. Closest non-hybrid we’ve seen to that sweet, tropical “sungold” flavor.

Brazilian Beauty at lower right. 

Continuing clockwise: Glacier, Stupice, 

the tiny Whippersnapper, Crnkovic, and not sure

Some turn up their noses at small varieties. Not in this house. Yes we had a few BLT monsters that outsized the bread they sat on, like this one (hard to believe, given our growing season).

But the small intensely flavored heirlooms are right for so many reasons: they got started and thrived even in the early heat, delivering fruit when no larger tomato could.

And they kept on delivering.

It's Been A Long Season

It's been a long growing season here in Minneapolis. The picture above was taken this afternoon and there are still plenty of tomatoes on the vines. We've been lucky to have a pretty good crop of tomatoes this year, especially our Black Cherry plant. For about a 3-4 week stretch, we were pulling off 5 lbs of cherry tomatoes off of that one plant, every 4-5 days.

The one thing that was frustrating this year were the really hot temps. That killed some early flowers but when the weather returned to "normal," the flowers came back, so now you see all of the green tomatoes on the vines in late September. I'm leaving them on until the temps really dip. This weekend is supposed to be in the 80's so maybe I'll get a few more to blush before I pick my last harvest.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the chipmunks were eating their fair share of my tomatoes. They live in the boulder retaining wall that divides my yard with my neighbors. Apparently, they liked the tomatoes so much that they've started growing their own, probably from my tomato's seeds. Here's a picture of a 20" plant growing out of the rocks. I've never seen this before and actually thought it was a weed until I noticed the little yellow flowers. It's about 10 feet from the closest tomato plant so my best guess is that the little rodents left some seeds in the cracks or something.

More Fermenting

We wrote earlier about Sandor Katz's new book, The Art of Fermentation. Buoyed by his reassuring tone and Permission to Ferment Anything, I threw together this one last Sunday after plucking a beautiful organic cabbage from the farmers market. Ingredients? Cabbage and organic lemon (mostly rind after I cleaned out the seeds).

With a rooster spur pepper for color and any slight heat it might impart. And salt.

 

I wanted to try a clean, clear set of flavors and spoon a little out each day in an effort to more clearly taste the fermentation process. Also, my boyfriend doesn't love the extreme flavor of an aged kraut-chi. A couple spoonfuls of this one in a bowl with a little olive oil sauces our rooftop greenie beans perfectly.

Today Mrs Homegrown at Root Simple waxes poetic about Katz and calls herself a fangirl.

Pretty sure I'm one too. The simple concoction pictured above tastes like the ocean, like spring, like heaven. And the rooster spur is gathering strength...

Mad for Melons

 

We love watching them grow in SIPs...and eating them too. Above, Tigger on the vine.

 Golden Midget (1 3/4 lb), Tigger (1 1/2 lb), Renee's icebox rainbow sherbet (1 1/8 lb)

Such pretty interiors, and sweetly flavorful too. The Tigger was loaded with seeds.

We dutifully washed and dried to save them all for next year. Imagine how precious if this were your only sugar source.

Harvest 2012: Provider Beans and Little Bells

Chicago absolutely fried earlier this summer, stopping much of the growth on all plants. But the weather's moderated and the harvest has been up and running in full force for the last several weeks. Even the second wave of tomatoes is coming in strong (after the first flowering was lost to nighttime heat), but more on that in another post.

Striking Chicago teachers wear red:

please support them

 

This summer we're singing the praises of these Provider bush beans from Bountiful Gardens. They've thrived in the heat and regardless how long they get (you always miss a few when picking) they're reliably tender. Other beans seem to set up their seeds earlier, so that this time of year the purple and yellow bush beans are more seed than good eating. Honestly this is my new favorite variety.

Provider bush beans

Picking lunch from the roof is one of the great joys of growing. Steamed Provider greenie beans with rooftop tomatoes and golden beets from the farmers market. That's a pretty typical summer lunch for us, with herbs and other seasonings.

Waiting for protein

Melons, eggplant, Jimmy Nardello and Little Bells sweet peppers plus a handful of tomats. Grab a knife and a fry pan and...lunch.

Love those Little Bells, from Wild Garden Seed. Check 'em out at the link: nice squat plants with small sweet peppers. They love growing in SIPs and this picture shows part of their color range.

Great pepper for northern climes with short seasons. Before fall's killing frost, we clip whole plants with remaining fruits attached, trim leaves and hang in a cool place. Fruit will continue to ripen on the stem for weeks.

Microgreens

We've been seeding greens in previously planted SIPs up on the roof. I like to give them a good start in the full, late-season sun before bringing them down and replanting in the raised bed/low tunnel with winter cover. Up top, lotsa mustard greens and some arugula.

Ruby red chard from Bountiful Gardens,

still awaiting their first true leaves

I've always savored these intensely flavored tiny greens, and apparently there's also every nutritional reason to love these babies:

Gene Lester, a researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his colleagues at University of Maryland, College Park, have conducted the first scientific analysis of nutrients in microgreens. The results, Lester tells The Salt, "totally knocked me over." The researchers looked at four groups of vitamins and other phytochemicals – including vitamin C, vitamin E, and beta carotene — in 25 varieties of microgreens. They found that leaves from almost all of the microgreens had four to six times more nutrients than the mature leaves of the same plant. But there was variation among them – red cabbage was highest in vitamin C, for instance, while the green daikon radish microgreens had the most vitamin E.

 Fetal kale

 

As young as these mustards are, they explode with flavor and make an ideal bed for just about anything on the menu.

Add a few roof tomatoes.

Top with some sauteed Jimmy Nardello peppers, garlic, and scallops and you get...

My idea of a perfect lunch