Exuberant vegetables

It's totally amazing how productive the tomatoes and other vegetables are in beds filled with fresh compost.  I'm continually reminded however, that, if I added more nutrients and watered more, I'd have a REALLY productive garden.

But I can barely keep up with roasting and freezing the tomatoes that I have (the ones that we can't eat fresh); in fact, I have marinara sauce simmering right now to freeze for winter.  They're not the 'tastiest' tomatoes, necessarily, some being harvested early to avoid squirrel herbivory, but I hate to waste them.

Here's an image of the front raised beds.  You can't see any ripening tomatoes, but they're there, in any case, and the leeks are getting quite large enough to harvest.

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Slow-roasted tomatoes

My favorite way to preserve tomatoes is to slow-roast them (at 200°F for ~ 8-10 hours), and then freeze them.  It's not original with me at all;  not being inclined to canning, a way to have tomatoes for delicious sauce for pasta or whatever without messing with hot water and jars is appealing.

I bumbled on to Kalyn's method in a Google search a couple of years ago, and have been delighted with the results.

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Heirloom tomatoes and white peaches

I was listening to the songs of crickets tonight; summer is here in the mountains of North Carolina.  They were delayed compared to the Piedmont, not surprisingly, but are singing loudly now.

I've been harvesting lots of tomatoes since I returned home (to the mountains) and have been trying to shore up the vines (the lightweight tomato cages available at the big box stores simply can't support the weight of Cherokee Purple and Summer Feast tomatoes without extra support).  I thought I'd taken a picture of the raised bed vegetable garden since returning, but apparently not!

I slow-roasted a batch of sliced Cherokee Purples overnight, and stuck them in the freezer.  They'll be summer magic in the winter, for sure.  And there are lots of green Summer Feast tomatoes that were casualties of the tipped-over cages.  I'll need to see if they ripen well, or not -- they're quite big, in any case.

I succumbed to buying a basket of white peaches at the Western North Carolina Farmer's market yesterday.  White peaches are wonderful, but, hmm, this is a lot of them.

But, the cost was remarkably low, and I'm planning to slow roast some of them for the freezer, make a peach salad for a potluck party on Saturday, and we'll eat lots of them fresh, and maybe I'll dry some of them as halves?

I was going to make a peach tart, too, but then realized that I don't have a pie or tart pan here;  it could be rectangular, however, or a 'rustic' tart on a baking pan.

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Succession planting of squash, beans, and tomatoes

As I'm harvesting garlic and the final bit of lettuce in the main beds, I'm thinking about what to plant next. The peas are just about finished, too, and one of the pea trellises will need underplanting with beans or a climbing cucumber or squash. (The other already has tromboncino squash ready to replace the peas). I suppose if I were more orderly and less into having fun in my vegetable garden, I'd had have already planned out my rotations.

And I really should think about preserving the harvest, too (wait, I'm still determined to enjoy the process) -- Barbara Damrosch in her revised Garden Primer talks about freezing whole tomatoes, then rinsing off the skins in hot water before using them in sauces in the winter. That's my idea of a great approach.

We've had a nice bit of rain today, after some unusually hot weather that's now moderated, so it's a good time to put out more summer squash, beans, and a few new heirloom tomato transplants that I acquired last weekend.

I also thought I'd experiment sowing some more seeds of specialty peppers (Corno di Toro, Ashe County Pimento, Numex, Sweet Red Cherry) and tomatoes (Black Russian and Super Marzano hybrid) to transplant later on. Peppers do their best in the warm days of fall here, especially if summer turns out to be especially hot. And tomatoes will keep growing until whenever frost comes.

I'll have the potato beds to swap out, too, probably in the next couple of weeks. I've already harvested some new potatoes around the edges, but will wait until the shoots start dying back to harvest the rest.

The soil in my vegetable beds work hard, so I'm trying to add LOTS of homemade compost (rather than commercial) at each rotation, as clearly I'm not replenishing my beds as much as they might need. A Thai eggplant planted in a container filled with this compost is huge, the biggest eggplant I've ever grown, witness to the power of nutrients! I'll have to see if the plant produces many fruits. I did see a tomato-sized eggplant last fall (the plant), growing in a large container in a Portland urban garden -- whoa! I'm not sure any of mine will get that big.

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Growing tomatoes

In a warm summer climate, with plenty of sun, tomatoes are almost a given in a vegetable garden. Even non-gardeners may stick one or two tomatoes in the ground, just to have some fresh ones. One of our neighbors has two staked tomato plants at the side of her house, in otherwise a sea of lawn.

a 'Beefy Boy'

Garden centers, nurseries, and local 'feed and seed' stores usually offer up the traditional hybrids: Big Boy, Better Boy, Roma, and Sweet 100, with some recent additions of Brandywine, Mortgage-lifter, and other well-known heirloom varieties. There are hundreds of different varieties of tomatoes, with varying levels of acid and sweet, shapes and sizes, colors, and stripes.

I've grown different sorts from seeds, too, and tried unusual types bought at horticultural student plant sales, and have just about come to the notion that growing ONLY disease-resistant tomatoes in my Southern soil is productive, and any non-disease resistant (heirlooms) need to be in containers. I love the diversity and history of heirlooms, and they're wonderfully delicious, too, of course.

This summer, the VFN-resistant varieties have been the clear winners. The so-called Amish paste tomatoes (actually a striped heirloom of some sort) have declined due to nematodes, the non-resistant Sweet 100's haven't lasted long either, and a couple of heirloom peppers have had some sort of sudden wilt, bacterial, I think. Hhrmph.

I haven't always been so scrupulous with rotations, and of course, that's the first line of organic management of common plant diseases like fusarium and verticillum wilt, and buildup of Southern root-knot nematodes (they LOVE the roots of non-resistant varieties of tomatoes and peppers).

Using rotations with French marigolds, canola, sesame, grasses, and cole crops are other ways of reducing nematode populations, along with solarization in mid-summer - I'm going to give those a try, too.

I'm quite tired of yellowing tomato leaves and sad-looking plants!

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