Posted on 08/06/2008 1:36:43 PM PDT by fishhound
A handsome new book by Amy Goldman jump-started memories of my family saving seeds from our beloved yellow oxheart tomatoes through fall and winter for spring planting. This was our heirloom tomato, although we did not think of it as such.
In reading Miss Goldman's "The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table" (Bloomsbury), I learned that one woman, who was involved with preserving a strain her ancestors had brought when they emigrated from Germany, still puts sugar on her sliced tomatoes.
I remember my grandmother doing this, although she also added a few drops of vinegar on the slices of beautiful, red-ripe - and juicy - beefsteak tomatoes and oxhearts as golden as the Virginia summer; she also put black pepper on cantaloupe. The slices of tomato were placed on a large white platter with exotic birds and flowers painted at either end. She added sugar and vinegar "to bring out the goodness."
Good tomatoes from the garden were part of growing up. The surplus - and it was considerable - was canned whole, quartered, mashed and juiced for enjoyment in winter. The tomatoes were good, and they were seasonal; we didn't know the hard, tasteless tomatoes found in today's grocery stores, tomatoes bred to withstand mechanical harvesting and long-distance shipping.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
My tomatoes on the deck are just turning red. Any day now. I’m drooling all over my keyboard.
ping
If there is a gardeners ping list, could you please pass this on to others.
Thank You.
I got a ton in buckets but barely any orange. Seems a lot of my garden here in MA is slow this summer. Someone gave me a gift of a black tomatoe plant and it’s fruits are still green...lol
He would dice some up with cucumber and onion and mix it with vineagar salt & pepper.
My dad's Dutch family put salt on them.
I’ve got tons of them (all still green), but some are getting bottom-rot.
That sounds good!
Ping Gardening
It is rare to have a good tomato season on the Oregon Coast.
But I still can find enough at the local Hippie Store to go on a nice binge of home grown.
Orange hockey pucks are all I find in the stores.
I have a pen pal in MA and it seems our weather mirrors each other from the Left/Right coast.
However yall get a bit more summer days.
And we both have dry wells in August.
I remember the joys of home-grown tomatoes. We grew tomatoes like our neighbors grew grass, and hot days in August meant moving down a row, bent double, clutching a bushel basket, picking "only the nice ripe ones" per my mother's directive.
We canned tomatoes, made tomato juice, pureed them into sauce for spaghetti and chili, and enjoyed them fresh on our burgers. When we'd reached our absolute tomato capacity, we hauled the leftover bushels to our neighbors so they could repeat the process.
Ah, the joys of fresh tomatoes in an Ohio January. I hated the work then, but I know how good I had it.
tomato ping
I’m awash in tomatoes, and have been for two months. I could pick 10 gallons of them right now. Early Girls, Roma and Sweet Cherry. There’s certain advantages to living in the San Joaquin Valley.
Orange hockey pucks are all I find in the stores
There is a local place that grows them hydroponically in green houses in the winter. They're more expensive than rubies but a pretty good approximation of a real tomato.
I have 12 tomato plants. Three each of Early Girl, Arkansas Traveler, Big Boy and Roma. We have been eating fresh tomatoes and sharing with our neighbors since June. I have pints and pints and pints of canned tomatoes along with many zip lock bags of slow roasted Roma’s in the freezer. It is very hard not to eat those slow roasted tomatoes before storing them! Man they are good. My Freeper about page has a few pictures of my small garden. It is a small garden but with just 12 tomato plants I have been awash in them and will be until the first frost (mid Nov. if this year is like last year)!
I'm about your age, and I remember it well. My grandmother, God rest her sweet soul, was an avid gardener. She used to grow corn, tomatoes, squash, carrots, peas, asparagus, green beans, and a varying number of more exotic vegetables every year. They grew very well, because she used to compost household garbage and horse manure, and apply a few shovels full of last year's compost to this year's garden rows before planting.
When I was a little boy, she did all the work and I enjoyed the fruits of her labor. As I grew up, she grew more frail, so from about the age of 9 I was enlisted to do the more strenuous chores of digging and fertilizing and weeding and such. In the spring I'd stop by her house as I walked home from school -- she lived a few hundred yards from us, on the way to the bus stop-- and see what needed to be done. And there was always something to do!
She never paid me with anything but fresh vegetables, which seemed unfair at the time in light of all my hard work. But I loved being with her and learning a little about the seasons of nature. Oh, what I'd give to have just one more afternoon with her in the garden in late spring...
-ccm
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