More Tomato Taste Tests

My goodness the tomatoes are coming along enthusiastically this year! 

The great tomato experiment is having a wildly successful growing season and we're excited about how well the plants are producing.  We have had tons of Nicholayev Yellow Cherry tomatoes and the Sasha Altai and are now starting to look seriously at salsa as a meal option.




Last week our Azoychka's started to ripen up and the first of the Zefen Shorts have also turned pink and ready to eat.










Azoychka's are large, bright yellow tomatoes that taste great and are low acid.  Its not as sweet as the Nicholayev's, but it is very good as a sliced tomato.

We'll make a salsa out of it tomorrow and let you know how it tastes.

This one is small, but the others are much larger.  This is a vining tomato and it is covered in them.  They scare us a little bit, in truth.








The Zefen Shorts are large, pink when ripe and very good. 


Yeah, that's an apple on the right.  The tomato does not get bright red, but a soft blush color. 








Zefen Shorts are a more acidic than the others so far, with a nice tomatoey flavor and we look forward to trying some sauces with these. 


The plant is covered with tons of fat, large Zefens, so we shouldn't be short on sauce this year.

I think I put a few out in the flower bed, just in case we didn't get many tomotoes from a plant, so we may be up to our armpits in them soon.

Grandma's Relish Recipe to the Rescue

Ahhh Summer.  Its that time of year when we think of slowing down and relaxing and mother nature is picking up speed. 

 

This is that strange time when you are amazed at the amount of food that is starting to come out of your garden and the realization that there is no way you can eat all of this stuff as it comes ripe.  You'd swear its too early to start canning, but the cucumbers start to pile up alot more than you ever imagined.

 

This is also the time when that age old phrase "where did this new zucchini come from" is heard far and wide.

 

We are making that statement almost daily right now.  I thought I had outsmarted the evil zucchini plant and chosen one that was supposed to grow 'smaller' zucchini. 

 


OK, so what that REALLY means is that you will get 5 times more zucchinis, but they WILL be smaller than the normal kind you see, equaling an equal amount of zucchini over the course of the summer.

 

We're still up to our armpits in zucchini.  

No, we can't eat them all and they just keep piling up.

Visitors are not jumping up and down with glee when we try to pedal zucchini on them, either.  They are taking the japanese cucumbers we offer them, however, which has helped out immensely.
 
 

Out of desperation, I flipped through my recipe book and didn't come up with enough recipes to put a dent in the growing pile of zucchini. 

 

Then I looked through my Grandma's recipes...and there was a recipe for zucchini relish - a recipe that is probably quite a bit older than I am - and it used 10 cups of zucchini!  SCORE!!!!
 

I had one of those "country grandmas" that could cook great tasting meals with nearly nothing in the pantry.  She was also one of the best brook trout fisherman I've ever known. 

Grandma had a large collection of recipes that she carefully guarded over the years and sometimes we would be lucky enough to learn one or two of her recipes.  No one could ever 'get a copy of that recipe' out of Grandma, and I'm afraid I've picked up that same habit.  It was only after Grandma had died that Grandpa let me borrow the recipes so I could get them written down - which was an adventure of its own. 

Just in case I end up being the same way, my Mom has been very clear that SHE gets "The Black Box" (my recipes) when I die.  Hopefully it won't come to that.

 

 

So I dove into the zucchini relish recipe.  I prepped my 10 cups of zucchini, delighted with my good luck.  I started cooking the relish and decided to water the vegetable garden while it simmered. 

 

Tomatoes happy - check

Peppers happy - check

Blueberries ready - munch munch munch

Pick more cucumbers - check

Lift a zucchini leaf…..NOOOOOO!  Not MORE ZUCCHINI!!!

 

I finished going over the bushes and we took in the two new armloads of zucchini.  The relish is ready to put up in jars and we're back at square one with the zucchini pile.  Great. 

On the bright side, this zucchini relish is AMAZING!  I think we'll make some more soon...very soon.  

August Tomato Update

OK, I'm sold on the heirloom tomatoes for cool coastal regions. 

We’ve been eating the Nikolayev Yellow Cherry tomatoes for a couple weeks now and those are SO GOOD.  The plant is covered in tomatoes and they're coming on slowly, but wow.  I'm not a big 'cherry tomato' fan, but we can't stop eating these.  Like fruity cherry tomatoes that you can't stop picking. 

Next year we'll plant several more of this kind to keep us in our new favorite 'candy tomatoes'.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday we tried our first Sasha Altai tomato.  Also loaded with tomatoes, but only one was ready to eat.  It was very good and hard to describe.  Not as acidic, but not as sweet, either.  The tomatoes are described as having 'complex flavor'...which explains why we really couldn't describe the flavor.

 

 

 

 

 

August 10th

 

Summer is in high gear and the garden is busy being a garden.  As for the current growth/production of the tomatoes, well July was the month of"take off and grow", and August is the month of "get busy setting tons of fruit".The indeterminate tomatoes (vining ones) are still growing like crazy and also putting on more and more tomatoes.The plants have all shot up and have been covered with blossoms and now they are covered in tomatoes. 

 

 



 



Even the peppers are taking off for the summer.  (Italian Roasters)

Nikolayev Yellow Cherry has been such a surprise.  This is a 'semi-determinate', but we think of it as a short little guy - covered with the sweetest tomatoes you've ever tasted.  We check this one over for new orange tomatoes several times a day...just in case one or two are ready to eat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heinz 9129 is loaded with tomatoes already, which surprised me.  It will be one of the latest to come ripe, but I am very impressed with how much fruit it already has and how large they are.  The tomato is stocky, very healthy and full of fruit.  We look forward to trying them out and see how they taste.

Azoychka is a vining tomato that grows and grows - and has tons of tomatoes on it.  These are on the outside of the plant as well as deep inside the shady middle.  I mistakenly thought that an heirloom may not produce as heavily as the hybrids do, but boy was I wrong on that one. 

Heirloom Tomato Experiment

We've all heard that you should try heirloom vegetables, right?  Well, I'm from the extreme cold, where the growing season is short and hybrids are your friend.  I'm not talking about the GMO hybrids, I mean the good old fashioned 'short season' hybrids.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, however, I have a temperate climate, nice weather and no severe freezing (when you're used to -20 to -40 in the winter, an occasional 10 degrees is nothing).  The downside, however, is that it is cool in the evenings and it rains until the 4th of July, which is not ideal tomato weather.  We didn't like how our local selection of 'Better Boy' or 'Early Girl' performed for us, so I started thinking about a cool weather tomato - and if they even exist.

Enter TomatoFest.com.  Their website listed more tomatoes than I ever imagined and even had a 'Cooler Coastal Collection' with 8 different kinds.  This collection looked good enough - tomatoes from Russia, China, Alaska and one from Heinz - all heirlooms and supposed to do great in our cool evening area.  So I took the plunge, got the seeds and started them early on (April), so I could set them out when it was warmer.

They all sounded great, we were skeptical, so I started 4 of each strain, just in case they didn't have a high germination rate.  Surprise!  All of them sprouted and we soon had little tomato plants crowding under our grow lights.

Here are the tomatoes included in our collection (by shortest time to tomatoes to longest):

Name	Height	Days	Season	Fruit Size	Color	From	Type
Sasha's Altai	Determinate	57	Early	5"	Bright Red	Southern Russia	Heirloom
Gold Dust	Determinate	62	Early	2"	Yellow-Orange	New Hampshire	Open Pollinated
Zhefen Short	Determinate	68	Early	3"	Pink	Zhengiiang China	Heirloom
Azoychka	Indeterminate:	70	Mid	3"	Yellow / Orange	Russia	Heirloom
Nikolayev Yellow Cherry	Semi-determinate:	71	Mid	Cherry	Bright Yellow	Russia	Heirloom
Sunset Red Horizon	Indeterminate	72	Mid	5"	Red	Southern Russia	Heirloom
Heinz-9129	Determinate:	73	Mid	3"	Bright Red	Ohio / Ontario	Open Pollinated
Japanese Black Trifele	Indeterminate	81	Late	6"	Black Purple	Russia	Heirloom

Here's what I did when I planted them:

Box Prep
Potting soil
Sub-irrigation planter  (see my other posts for info on this one)
1 cup of lime in the top  4" of soil
2 tomatoes per box

Layout in the garden
Street 1

Box 1	Zefen/Heinz
Box 2	Peppers
Box 3	Azoy/Nicholai

Arbor

Box 1	Sunset/Japanese
Box 2	Red Bore Kale
Box 3	Gold Dust/Sasha

Garage

Planting Time - in each planting hole

Small handful of Cascade Minerals
Small handful of HuMagic (Hendrikus Organics)
Small handful of Organabloom (Hendrikus Organics)

1st weekend in June

Spray-N-Grow Micronutrient Spray

1st weekend in July

Spray-N-Grow Micronutrient Spray

1st weekend in August

Spray-N-Grow Micronutrient Spray

Water sub -irrigation planter daily

Progress:
March started seeds indoors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 9 - moved tomatoes to larger containers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May planting time in containers under cover.  Moved out last weekend in May.

June 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 27

 

July 5 - Trellises added

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

July 15







I'll add update posts as the summer progresses. 

Happy Gardening!