At Last, Tomatoes

Julia Child, Cosmonaut Volkov, Matina, black cherry, and yellow cherry tomatoes of unknown origin.

First real harvest of the season, and a relatively small one, but given the trials of this summer especially welcome.

These arrived a couple weeks later than 2010. Ate the small ones tonight for supper with torn lemon basil. BLTs tomorrow.

As a line cook I worked with many years ago once said: It ain't love, but it ain't bad.

The Plant Chicago Open House

Open house noon to 4 at The Plant this Saturday, Aug 13, with tours on the half hour. Plus, free food and beer.

Plant Chicago is a nonprofit dedicated to promote sustainable food production, entrepreneurship, and building reuse through education, research and development. To this end, Plant Chicago is repurposing a 93,500 sq. ft. retired meatpacking facility, The Plant, into a net-zero energy vertical farm. A complex and highly interrelated system, one-third of The Plant will hold aquaponic growing systems and the other two-thirds will incubate sustainable food businesses by offering low rent, low energy costs, and a licensed shared kitchen. The Plant will create 125 jobs in Chicago’s economically distressed Back of the Yards neighborhood – but, remarkably, these jobs will require no fossil fuel use. Instead, The Plant will divert over 6,500 tons of food waste from landfills each year to meet all of its heat and power needs.

Fresh-Dug Potatoes from Bruce's Roof--Cranberry Red

 

My my my. I cannot begin to describe how creamy these gems are, fresh from the steamer (nestled in with some inferior farmer market potatoes).

But let's back up a sec. Occasional GRG blogger Brad shared some cranberry red seed potatoes with us in April. Bruce chitted them before planting.

Last day of July, my tobacca-harvesting pal Marc and I went over to cut down the plants Bruce had grown for the project.

And Bruce wondered aloud if the 'taters were ready, so we checked one of SIP bins.

As he dug around, he found a beauty.

 But there were more to come...

A gorgeous bunch of cranberry red, gifted to me.

(Meanwhile, Carl monitors activity on the street from his post near the potato SIPs.)

So how did we enjoy the gumball-sized 'taters included in our bunch? With this bad pic, you'll see: after light steaming, we ate them lollipop style, rolled in French butter and kosher salt.

Life does not get better than that.

Easy Fruit Fly Trap

It works. I now have a glass that's wicked with dead fruit flies at the bottom...

Mystery of the Rooftop Tomato Funk, 2011 Version

As late as June 26 the tomatoes in the larger SIPs looked robust.

 

Because we planned to be away over the long 4th of July weekend, Art set up his excellent auto-watering system, a series of timers programmed for a daily fill of all our rooftop SIP reservoirs, including the large white ones, to overflowing. Ten days later, problems with the large-SIP tomatoes emerged.

Some yellowing on the Matina

 

...and other tomatoes in the large SIPs

Leaves curling

 Purple pigmentation

And then we began a week of 100+ temps, which means it was likely closer to 115 degrees F on the roof. This was around July 17. I put up some sheets to shade the large-SIP tomatoes, Art helpfully pointing out that the sun, lower in the sky now, would still blast them.

He created a better sun block from some brand-new, garbage-picked shades with tiny holes for air flow. One thing I knew for certain: the auto-watering system was a dream, keeping me from having to go to the roof even in the relatively cooler early morning hours to water.

The tomatoes looked awful, not setting flowers and yellowing up even more. Beyond this, they just looked spindly and not right.

Pause for a quick historical note: I bleach-scrubbed all the SIPs this spring. Insult to injury, I blended brand new potting mix (peat and perlite) for the larger white tomato SIPs to avoid the risk of pathogens overwintering. And now the funk seemed only to affect those same white SIPs. 

How do I know? Because a scant ten feet away, tomatoes planted in 5-gal yellow SIPs were holding their own and even thriving in the extreme heat.

 

I had a thought, based on something I'd read over at Greenscaper Bob's blog Inside Urban Green over the years and also after checking online tomato problem photos. It's possible, of course, that we had a couple concurrent issues, but what about overwatering as a cause for the decline in the large-reservoir tomato SIPs? Bob says unequivocally that SIPs can be overwatered. Had we been drowning the plants in the larger SIPs by using the automatic watering system to fill their deep reservoirs to capacity every day?

We untied one of the tomatoes and Art lifted out the top bucket. Lots of roots, that's for sure, all of them sitting in water.

I siphoned the liquid out of every reservoir and began adding a measured amount of water to each of them every day, an enormously time-consuming job for someone used to automatic watering, I assure you.

Then (duh) Art suggested drilling a hole lower down on the reservoir bucket. We could always plug it for next year if this experiment didn't work.

Added to all this...weirdly, not ALL of the large-reservoir SIP tomatoes were sickly. Here's a Valencia and the elegant Julia Child that seem OK.

 

How lucky to have five tomatoes planted in 5-gal SIPs, not only as a control group in this unanticipated and haphazard experiment, but also for harvesting and enjoying. Here are some shots of them on July 31--Valencia, Cosmonaut Volkov, and Matina among them.

Art used some scrap lumber to build a nice strong support for them. We don't have one on this SIP run, because we use it mostly for lower growing greens and vegetables that don't require support. Because Bruce grew so many beautiful tomato starts, I couldn't resist planting a few extras. Happy I did.

So how are the large SIPs doing with their smaller water reservoirs? Difficult to say. Because I'm an eternal optimist, I sometimes think I see a revival. This black cherry is producing, and appears a bit healthier at top. Same with the lovely small yellow tomato whose name is unknown to me (I hadn't realized I'd even planted a yellow tomato).

 

Thanks for reading the details of this tomato mystery. If you have thoughts on the situation, we'd be grateful to see them in comments. In the interim, we'll keep you posted.

I'm Worried, Aways in Love

The old Wilco tune comes to mind when I ponder my connection to growing food.  I started when I was 8, my first radishes igniting a slow-burn fuse on a lifetime love. 

(BTW, what was up with the draperies back then?)

 

Why worried? Because I am always in love with what we grow and, more specifically, with eating it. But again this year the tomatoes aren't right and it feels personal. More precisely, some tomatoes on our roof are just fine and others are sickly. I have 50 years of experience. What's the problem? (Clearly that's rhetorical until I post details.)

For now let's focus on Saturday breakfast from all the food that's thriving on the roof, despite hail, inches and inches of rain, high winds, and that week of 100-degree temps.

Jimmy Nardello peppers, a Santa Fe Grande pepper for heat, the pingtung long and Listada eggplants and Matina tomatoes. Plus a whole bunch of chopped basil from the six varieties out front.

Here's a rain/wind-ripped branch of peppers called Little Bells. We've had roughly 11 inches of rain in 11 days, with bucketfuls falling all at once. And wind.

We chopped these sweet peppers for the melange. The power keeps going out too, twice in one week (make that three times--it just went down again). Last night's power went mostly-but-not-all out: weirdly down to 41 volts, enough to kill air conditioner, computer, and fridge, leaving us in cocktail-hour light, which would have been fun, but it was hot and who wants to open the freezer at that point for ice. I'm lucky to live with a nice guy equipped with a voltage meter.

Eggplant slices go into the cast iron pan, already slick with a hot film of coconut oil. Toward the end, I'll sprinkle the tomato halves with kosher salt and lay them face-down into the hot cast iron to warm.

A nice miso sauce on top and that's a breakfast I love.

Maybe I shouldn't worry so much...about wobbly electrical grids and confounding weather, wondering if we could feed ourselves in the face of shortages. But I do.

Rooftop Vegetable Lunch

A small meal, but a lovely one.

Art put up a better sun block to shade the tomatoes, a majority of which appear to have some kind of funk, despite bleach-washing the SIPs and using fresh potting mix. Too sad to blog more about it now.

We got nearly 7 inches of rain last night in Chicago. Drastic weather changes are upon us.