These are my largest tomatoes so far -- tennis-ball sized. According to the tag they're an heirloom variety called Amish Paste, although they sure don't look like a paste-type tomato. Whatever they are, I sure wish they'd ripen soon.
Unfried green tomatoes 
15 comments:
Beautiful! I have a couple of photos of my own tomates - great horticultural minds think alike, apparently - but they're not as nice.
And not as big. I'm like you, though: faster, faster!
Oh, well. Slower, slower is OK, too....
These look gorgeous. Your photos from the garden make me envious. I love gardening, but don't have the space at the moment.
Bls: You know what they say...variety is the spice of life;-)...
Christopher: One of my best gardening experiences ever was the year I graduated from college. I was living with a couple of friends in this dumpy, rundown duplex just off campus; actually, once upon a time (1930's?) these had been fairly nice townhouse units, but now they were a mess, and what used to be the front yard was basically a maybe 3 by 4 plot of rock-hard impacted dirt mixed with paint chips from the building.;-) This state of affairs just bothered me, so I bought a couple of flats of annuals (with my meager bookstore-lackey paycheck) and some potting soil, and planted my flowers. To my amazement, they survived and thrived. Anyway, about a week after I'd planted them, I saw our neighbors -- extremely scary looking, Doc-Martened, leather-clad, bespiked/bechained punk rockers, whose band name I'm not even going to print here so as not to offend any tender sensibilities amongst my readership;-) -- over in their front yard, planting tomatoes. They started asking me for gardening advice. Between our two units, we spiffed up the building, and pretty soon the supe, who lived in the unit on the other side of me, fixed up his little garden plot. So...gardening makes good neighbors and combats rental-unit blight.;-)
Try container gardening...it's like haiku with dirt and plants.;-)
I'll be up to see you soon! (Vine-ripened tomatoes=heaven)
LC, how is it that you live so much further north than me (here in 'ganderland), and my largest tomatoes are the size of my fingernail? (Yes, yes: got them in the last weekend of May---shoulda been sooner. But still!)
Oh well: at least I'll be picking my first banana peppers next week . . .
I was lucky in that all my starts were pretty hearty plants, so they were already ahead of the curve. And I can't believe that I got some of the best tomatoes at our up-north low-rent big-box store that is -- how can I say this? -- not exactly Meijer's. Or even Kmart. It has a sign on the door that says something to the effect of, "Why drive to another city to shop?", to which I always respond, in my head, "Because your merchandise sucks." Their only mitigating factors are their pharmacy, which is really fast to fill scripts and easy to work with, and their occasional canned-food sales.
The resident tomato expert at GardenWeb, Dr. Carolyn Male, says she doesn't think Amish Paste is really a paste variety. She says they're too juicy and seedy. Amish Paste is roundish to oblong and grows up to about 1/2 lb or so. Yours are probably them.
You say "paste tomato" like it's a bad thing.
I grow Roma's. They're a paste tomato . . . and they're also my fave (whether fresh or . . . well, not paste, but puree'd. And into the freezer. For winter-time spaghetti. Mmmm!)
My zucchinis are finally starting to make . . . zucchinis. I still can't understand, why there seem to be two different kind of blossoms: one on tall, thin stalks, which just fall off. The other, on little tiny zucchinis (my biggest is about the size of my thumb: I'll probably pick it in a few days---can't tell exactly how fast it will grow. Such is the way of zucchinis! Many of them, eventually, will get shredded&frozen. Also for later spaghetti)
I can't pretend that the time I put into gardening is less than the money I'd pay for the stuff at the store.
But it's still more fun this way. :-D
I like the paste tomatoes too, but only if they're genuinely ripe and tasty...the supermarket kind have absolutely no flavor or texture.
And you're right about the relative expense of gardens. Now, this year I have a couple of tomato plants that are really loaded with fruit, but usually...well, if I had to calculate the cost per 'mater, I'd have some pretty expensive tomatoes.;-) On the other hand, since I'm nowhere near a decent farmer's market, where else am I going to get all those wacky and wonderful heirloom varieties? I even have a green one this year.
"I still can't understand, why there seem to be two different kind of blossoms: one on tall, thin stalks, which just fall off. The other, on little tiny zucchinis"
Male and female.
And you can rub them together and make the little zucchinis grow big! As my father used to say: "I knew sex was corny, but I didn't know corn was so sexy." (Don't blame him; he was born during the flapper era.)
(Really. You can hand-fertilize. I did it for fun one year.)
But the tall, thin blossoms are still going to fall off, right? They can't become zucchinis, can they?
[Regretting my lack of botany, now :-/]
I just don't remember my father ever having to do this w/ his zukes! (Of course, that was in "Everything Grows Here" California *g*)
I ate my first (home-grown) pepper today, Yay! :-D
No, only the females can become zuchs. You don't have to do this, but you can - and it ensures that all the females will become pollinated.
All you need to do is transfer the pollen from the male to the female(s). Here's a page with some pics.
(I'm not sure if bees are the major pollinators for zucchinis, but if they are, that's one reason to do some hand-pollinating. The honeybee population has dropped dramatically over the past 10 or 20 years; it's a problem for everyone in the East, although perhaps things are different in California.)
The last time I attempted squash -- I had, I think, three hills for zucchini, yellow crookneck and a winter squash of some kind -- it was a disaster...I tried hand-pollinating, but the infant squash would shrivel up and fall off the vine. One plant also had borers -- had to do surgery on the stems to cut the little critters out -- and it was a nasty garden year anyway. It's also a challenge to find spaces with adequate sunlight here in the woods. It amazes me that the Native Americans around here could grow the vegetables they could when presumably there were even more trees.
So I wish I could help, but...:-(.
J.C.: Congrats on the pepper! I had a tiny, marble-sized cherry tomato ripen after our last rain...but I have my eye on the bigger tomatoes. They're still as green as grass.
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