Posted on 08/04/2018 4:25:08 PM PDT by vannrox
My local Safeway sells “heirloom” tomatoes, at about $4 a pound. They’re fragile and thin-skinned, unlike all the other tomatoes on sale. They don’t keep well. The heirlooms are also probably picked at break stage and not vine-ripened, for logistics reasons. They’re good but not as good as something from the garden.
Save your BBQ ash if you are a hardwood BBQer that is
How to sweeten tomatoes
Tomato plants do well in slightly acidic soil, but once the fruits start ripening, you can increase the alkalinity of the soil for sweeter tomatoes. Wood ash is the preferred agent for raising pH levels because it supplies potassium too, a mineral known to increase the production of sugars and their transport to fruits. It can also increase the production of lycopene, the carotenoid behind the antioxidant power of tomatoes.
Another option is the application of limestone/dolomite which also adds calcium and magnesium to the soil. Home gardeners often use baking soda as a quick fix solution to reduce the tartness of tomatoes.
it is a fraud what they sell in grocery stores. You could make a meal out of one of my grandfather’s garden tomatoes.
I live adjacent to a 200 acre tomato farm that grows romas for the grocery stores. They pick them green and ship to one chain’s mega warehouse where they are refrigerated then gassed to turn them red at a later date.
The pickers toss the red ones on the ground and we can take as many red ones off the bushes as we want but we don’t because they are they have zero flavor.
Those would probably be Odoriko or Momotaro. A local grocery sells Odoriko but I prefer Momotaro. It's hard to find except at certain farmers' markets. There was a grocery in the San Jose area that sold it (Cupertino) and I also found it at a farmers' market in Los Angeles. It is heavenly, sweet, rich tomato. Delicious.
I have no idea about the deer population in your area years ago or now so I won’t comment on that. I would doubt there were no deer years ago that were garden pests though there may have been less. People used to plant things that helped repel deer from gardens.
As to the insects and diseases I would bet they had the same if not more issues years ago, except they knew how to garden better so they had those things more under control. The thing is people were serious about gardening about the time the gardeners of 40 years ago were born, many needed that garden to survive not so many years before that- so they planned very carefully, they knew how to compost good dirt and exactly how to work the ground and were particular about where they planted things, rotated crops, companion planting, and planting certain flowers that would help deal with disease and insects. Because they were serious gardeners they had more knowledge in their head than even they knew, many things they learned as small children helping their parents with the garden.
There are people who plant things together or apart because their family always did, not realizing that is one way to deal with bugs bothering things or not bothering them. The way they made their own compost and worked their soil had a lot to do with keeping disease under control.
People depending on seeds or growing certain varieties to keep pests at bay is a very recent thing, before that chemicals were commonly used to keep pest and disease at bay- the really old time gardeners before that had to do things in a way to keep the pests from starving them.
Gardeners of 40 years ago had both the knowledge of experts before chemicals were available and they had a variety of chemicals that they felt were harmless so no problem using them freely. Talk about a double whammy on the pest and disease.
Peaches used to be soft, sweet and delicious. Now all the best go into cans while the seconds go to the grocery store - hard bitter and generally inedible.
There was an article a year or so back about how your body processes food. If a food ‘smells right’ your body utilizes it best, If not right, then the food is not properly digested. A tomato, a peach should smell like a tomato or a peach. Now days what you find in the store barely has any scent.
Meanwhile, the fish counter smells strongly because of improper display and storage of fish & shellfish. With fresh fish & shellfish, there should be only a very faint salty ocean smell, else it is decaying/rotting.
KNOWLEDGE IS KNOWING THAT A TOMATO IS A FRUIT
WISDOM IS NOT PUTTING IT IN A FRUIT SALAD
PHILOSPHY IS WONDERING WHETHER THAT MEANS KETCHUP IS A SMOOTHIE
I grow Cherokee Purple variety. Not pretty to look at and don’t even appear red until you slice them and they are bright red inside and very tasty. We can them, and when you blanch them and slip the skins off they are red. The odd color is only skin deep.
I got seeds at Monticello during a visit, and save them year to year. They have few seeds in them. Supposedly they were a favorite of Jefferson.
“its like the red “delicious” apple....omg...like cardboard...awful...tasteless...but it was bred so it would be easy to ship....easy to pack...uniform....
but its only uniform to me is its horrible taste.”
Red delicious apples stink. So do store bought tomatoes. One of the few (emphasis on the word few) things I miss from when I lived up north in IL (I’m now in FL) is the Farmer’s Market that carried fresh locally grown produce in the summer and was a spit away from where I lived. Nothing as delicious (unlike the apples of the same name) as a home grown tomato.
When fall came, you could buy wonderful squash, my favorite being Acorn, and buy a beautiful pumpkin from their Pumpkin Patch for Halloween too. And then they would close for the season ... and then the rain, high winds, snow storms, hail, slippery icy roads, and generally frozen tundra would strike for the next 6 months, which is why I now live in Florida.
Everything in life is a trade-off, in my case good tomatoes and apples and deli meats versus 6 months of very often rotten weather. It was no contest. Although I must say around Christmas, only for a week or two, a first snowfall was a glorious thing to behold, until all that snow turned to slush and the morning commute to work on the roads was a total danger to one’s physical and psychological well-being.
Now I’ve got swaying palms, balmy breezes, and warmth all year round, with only an occasional hurricane threat to keep me on my toes. As I stated earlier, life is a series of trade-offs, and I made my trade. Good luck to you all in your own pursuit of trade-offs. But I sure do miss a good tomato (sigh).
Ditto that !
I buy Gala apples for eating out of hand and for fruit salads. They have a nice flavor and texture...actually the best eating type of all the multitude of today's crappy apples. Wrap each tightly in the sticky-type saran and store in your bottom hydrator...and they will stay perfectly for a goodly number of days.
Also, I pay a little more money to purchase organic bananas. I don't throw bananas away any more.....so I actually save a lot of $$$ in the long run.
I only buy two or three of the organics at a time...even when the peel is somewhat green you can eat them right away. They last and last, and are still good even if the peel looks a little mottled after a while...and they're not riddled with mushy black spots when you buy them, like so many regular bananas are. Regular bananas have a very short fruit-bowl life the minute you get them home.
Bon apetit....Leni/MinuteGal
Am a Gala apple lover myself. In the winter months up north in IL (I’m in FL now), where nary a good tomato was to be found, I would buy a package of cherry tomatoes, slice or chop them up using the juice produced also, and pour Wishbone Robusto Italian dressing from the bottle (it has to be Wishbone Robusto; can get it online at Walmart’s) over the chopped cherry tomatoes.
You can add chopped onion or other veggies to the mix if you like, but as they will change the taste slightly, I’m a purist and prefer to just use the tomatoes and dressing. Use this as a side dish, or it goes wonderfully as a topping on any deli meat sandwich (best w/deli meat on French or Italian bread, or a sub bun, but would work with most any bread). You can use small pear tomatoes too; however I find the Cherry tomatoes more flavorful.
Also wonderful as a bruchetta topping on toasted garlic bread. This concoction got me through many a rotten IL winter, until late spring arrived and the local Farmer’s Market reopened. Will be using this down here in FL too, as FL has lousy super market tomatoes. Bon Appetit!
P.S., Roma tomatoes work really well with my tomato/Robusto Italian concoction above.
My wife is Japanese and she taught me that a sweet tomato has a peculiar smell if you hold it close to your nose.
You need to learn the smell, but the best I can describe is that it’s an earthy smell. Very distinctive.
So this knowledge is relatively unknown in this country.
I've never heard this one before. You learn something new every day!
Here's a link to an article that might be related to this:
https://www.livescience.com/27349-smells-influence-fruits-sweetness.html
Thanks for posting that.
I learned that really good tomatoes, (usually home-grown and fully ripe), have gold flecks on the top near the stems. Yum.
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