Tomatoes Almost Ready

We have a couple of them turning red.  Conditions are hot.   See how the tomatoes are almost as tall as me?  Oh, and let me make it clear that I do not look that pale.  Twyla will attest to the fact that the bright sun and the imbalance in the shot make me look washed out.  I'm actually nicely tanned from all the farm work.

While I don't like watering every day, I'll do what I have to.  Best not to let them get dry and then water them or it rain because it will split the fruit.  I hate it when that happens.  You get a picture perfect 'mater just turning red in the summer heat, and while the plant doesn't look like it's too dry, you get a rainstorm or you finally get around to watering and all the ones that were closest to pickin' perfection split down the side from stem to stern.  Don't want to let that happen.  That's zucchini and yellow squash in the left of the pic.

I've got some green beans in the back that are ready to pick.  We've eaten lots of sugar snap peas.

Now I've got corn up to my shoulder, while many people barely have corn knee high. The corn grows about four inches a day.  Those are potatoes in the foreground. Pickles is only in the corn because I'm standing there for the picture.

Gardening Progress May 11, 2011

I have been growing stuff for years.  All kinds of vegetables, shrubs and trees that I like, and Tea Roses, which for those of you not heavily into gardening, are those big domesticated varieties.  But what amazes me is how excited I get every time I go out and see new things growing and thriving.  You would think that the thrill would somehow diminish over time, but it never does.  I go out and look at the new little tomatoes on the vines that are now almost the size of golfballs and I grin from ear to ear and act giddy in front of my wife.

My biggest tomato right now

There might be a few other people like us who have their garden in early, but they are few and far between.  We had one frost about a week ago that had us out covering anything that might suffer damage, and it was a lot of rushed work, which is never fun, but it was worth it.

This is straw bale gardening heaven

When I look at how well all of the plants are growing, I know that unless some strange tragedy strikes, we are going to have a great harvest.  I'm hoping that in another month we will be feasting on our own vine ripe tomatoes.  And let me say something about the term, "vine ripe."  Just because you leave some hot house tomatoes on some vines and ship them to the supermarket that way does not make them vine ripe.  Such tomatoes at premium prices may have a slightly better taste than the flavorless orbs that were picked green and shipped in cold storage, but they taste nothing like a tomato that I pick full red off my own vine, or get at the road side stand by someone who grew it locally the same way I would.

The world is full of people who only think they've tasted a tomato.  That sounds like a bold statement, but it's true nonetheless.  Which brings me to something else worth repeating.  NEVER refrigerate tomatoes.  I cannot over-emphasize this enough.  NEVER refrigerate tomatoes.  At least not good ones.  Those bland pieces of, er, umm, . . . those impostors from the supermarket; it doesn't much matter what you do with those.  Here's why:
There is a compound in tomato called Z-3 hexenel, which accounts for the tomato's scent and taste (well, that is, if it was left to ripen on the vine and wasn't refrigerated). The development process which turns tomato's linolenic acid to the Z-3 that makes our mouth and nose sing is hindered by cold. If you drop the temperature on a tomato to below 54° F for several hours, you kill the hexenel.  The longer the tomatoes stay in refrigeration the more of the hexenel you eliminate.

Since most any produce you buy in a supermarket has been kept as cold as is practical in order to prevent spoilage, you aren't going to get really good tasting tomatoes.  It's just not practical from a commercial standpoint.  No produce distributor is going to have separate, specially regulated temperature storage and trucks for tomatoes, apart from the same facilities used for lettuce and other things that need cold to last long.

Butter crunch leaf lettuce in front, Brussel sprouts behind growing in the leftovers of last years straw bales

That chicken wire is two feet tall and is there to discourage the two chickens from nibbling on them.  Out of all the chickens there were two that the other chickens just wouldn't stop picking on;  one of the black sexlinks and the little bantam.  I just let them out of the arks so they could roam and not be terrorized by the others.

Those are four of my cabbage plants in the back row that are just starting to form heads.  To the right of them are Romaine lettuce. I actually prefer the leaves of cabbage prior to heading.  They are deep and rich with green and have a subtly different flavor.  They are still tender, and most delicious when gently sauteed with some turkey ham.  (If that's not considered Kosher, I'll need a Rabbi to tell me why.  And, no, I'm not interested in keeping Glatt Kosher.

Twyla made her regular cole slaw recipe using the riper loose leaves of cabbage one time recently.  The slaw was such a deep, dark green that you wouldn't think of it as cole slaw.  The flavor was much stronger, although not hot, or spicy, like some cabbages can be, but the flavor was still too strongly different for Twyla.  I really liked it after mellowing out and blending in the fridge for 24 hours.
Those are bell pepper plants in the foreground.

Remember my post, Tater Talk?  Here is the cage as of today with another thin layer of straw and compost.  As a reminder, this cage is about 3' wide, by 7' long, and 2' tall.

I have two other beds of potatoes for experimental comparison.  One bed is a terraced spot in the back which was filled in with a mixture of some compost and a lot of rich soil that I dug up from under the dogwoods and hardwoods.  It's almost like peat moss.  The other bed is out front next to the corn.  It is simply the plain red clay dirt but with most of the granite rocks removed.  This is all for me to have real empirical evidence for what works best.  There's just something in my nature of the scientist who wants experimental proof for things.

As for the clay soil bed, I will try to only add plain mulch straw on top around the plants, and only in small amounts.  The goal will be to merely cut down on the weed growth.  Maybe it will, and maybe it won't.  I won't add any other soil amendments and no fertilizer.  I want to see just how much of a difference it makes to just let them grow with as little help as possible.

To the right is a closer view of a couple of the potato plants sprouting up through the straw.  When they get a couple of inches taller, I'll throw in an inch or two more of composted leaves and such.  I think I'll put in small amounts of chicken manure mixed with straw, but only in very tiny amounts.

Young potato plant

The close up is of one of the potato plants in the back terrace bed of compost and humus.  It almost looks like a variation of radish, but that will change as the plant matures.  It seems that red potatoes have a deeper green leaf as compared to the russets.

This is a side view of the rear potato bed.  I intend to keep adding more humus and maybe some other top soil to this area as they grow.  I may even experiment further by adding small amounts of 10-10-10 commercial fertilizer during the season.  It may seem a bit chaotic behind the bed there, but perhaps you can make out the beautiful daisies growing there.  A lot of wild flowers grow on the steep slope behind the house, along with lots of blackberries, which are looking really good this year.

This is a pic of one of my pea patches further down from where the potatoes are.  The white blossoms in the background are all blackberries.  Much of the rest of the greenery are wildflowers.

That's enough for today.  I've got things that demand my attention.  Maybe I'll have some time later to show you what I've done with some roses.

Shalom Y'all

Gardening Progress

Hard to believe it was almost a month ago when I put the first tomato plants in the straw bales.  In the pic below you can see them under the screen that was there in case we needed to cover them quickly for frost protection.  Those are marigolds at the edge.  They compliment the tomatoes.  Insects that like tomatoes don't like marigolds.  Plus, they will just make the garden look prettier.

It's amazing how fast and almost imperceptibly the plants can grow.  The temps have dipped into the high thirties, and it can frost as late as May where we are, but for some reason I'm not worried about it.  We've got butterflies galore and the hummingbirds are back.  We have at least two pair and possibly three feeding in the back yard.  But here are the tomatoes as of today.

The tomatoes all have blossoms and are looking very healthy.  I keep gathering leaves from my own and the neighbor's yards to add to the walkways and the compost bins.  We eat fresh salad every day from four varieties: Head lettuce, Romaine, leaf lettuce, sorrel.  I also collect some sheep sorrel to go in there as well.

I also planted three varieties of bell pepper.  California Wonder, Red bell, and yellow bell.  But I confirmed with another farmer that I trust that pretty much all common bell pepper turns red if you just let it ripen all the way.  It's only the yellow and purple varieties that have been raised to give those specific colors when ripe.

That's red cabbage in the upper left.  I have three more like it elsewhere.  That's head lettuce to the right.  Those are pepper plants in the foreground.  The lettuce and cabbage got planted in the remains of last year's straw bales which were about 80% composted.  I raked them into piled rows and planted the cool weather veggies in them weeks before we set out the new bales.  The black you see at the top is a bed of soil with spinach on top of four straw bales.  Out of the pic to the left I planted radishes and nasturtium.

Planting in straw bales makes for nearly weed free gardening and high yield.  But if you are very serious about high yield, you will still need to check your plants every two or three days for suckers.  For the benefit of you newbies, suckers are not some kind of insect or pest.  They are unwanted growth on the plant itself.  I wish I could have gotten the focus better, but here is how you recognize suckers.

A sucker will occur in the joint of the plant where a leaf branch comes off the main stem of the vine.  Here is one just below a fruit stem that has blossoms on it.  You simply want to pinch that little sucker right out of there.  The reason they are called suckers is because they suck energy away from the fruit production, trying to spread the vine elsewhere.  As I stated in the post on grapes, plants will try to propagate themselves both asexually and sexually.  If you were to let a tomato vine run along the ground, it would put out roots wherever it touched the ground and keep spreading.

By pinching off the suckers, you cut off the plant hormone that signals for the plant to keep doing that, and instead signal the plant that it would be better to produce fruit with seed.

Little Bitty Suckers

I try to check for these little suckers every other day if possible and pinch them out while quite small.  The more you do it and get used to knowing what to look for, the easier it gets.

Sometimes, you will get suckers at the base of the plant.  They might even grow up looking like a smaller, separate plant.  Cut that thing out of there.  It will just pull more energy out of the plant that could go toward producing more fruit.  It usually won't produce more fruit itself, being shaded by the larger part of the plant.

While at the feed store the other day, I found out they had a few asparagus plants left, and I couldn't resist.  So along with buying some red seed potatoes, I got a four pack of asparagus and planted them yesterday as well.  I dug down really deep, about 16 inches and about a foot wide.  Then I went and scraped up a bunch of top soil from beneath the dogwoods and the other trees to fill the hole.

My little asparagus beds

They don't look like much in the photo, but a lot of work went into amending that soil to make it very rich.

When Being Dense is Good

Have you ever stopped to really consider that the modern convenience of refrigeration is REALLY modern.  I mean, it has only existed since the early 1950s? Somebody figured out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics meant that it was possible to figure out a way to use chemistry and modern machinery to make heat flow  in such a way to cool things down, even in a tropical environment.  Amazing.

But modern, or should I say "post modern" man has become so irresponsible and lazy that he just takes this modern convenience for granted.


I'm pretty sure that anybody reading this has experienced a power failure and has had the experience of losing food and having to clean up the mess of thawed out freezers and refrigerators. Imagine the cleanup in New Orleans after Katrina.  Sorry for that mental image, but I've got a point to make.

What if refrigeration wasn't just temporarily gone for a few days? What if you were pretty sure that it was gone for the indefinite future?

Canned tomatoes and pickles

That's what we are planning on.  We still freeze stuff.  But we "can" a lot of stuff.  I put the word can in quotes because I have no idea how many people might come to this site and not understand this archaic term.  It's funny because the home, or do-it-yourself process doesn't involve cans, but rather jars.

Anything you see or buy in the grocery store that comes in a can, you can "can" yourself. (Why do I suddenly have this image of kicking legs and ruffle skirts?)  We haven't done it yet, but one of the next things we will can is chicken.

Left hand

Two things I need to type out at this point:  I just came back from a seminar about butchering animals.  I hurt myself pretty badly yesterday around noon. I was cutting up my spent tomato vines and other plants and in a rush I snipped my pinkie.  Okay, I really snipped my pinkie.  OKAY.  It's darned lucky I didn't hit the bone.  Picture to follow.  Shut up.  You know you want to see it.  It's a good thing there was a nurse in the house. She had me bandaged up and back to work in about 15 minutes.

So I'm sitting here trying to type and I've got duct tape on my left pinkie and it is seriously slowing me down.  Normally I can just type my thoughts, but this is like having a stroke or something.  It's taking forever to get the words out.  Now I know how stroke victims feel.

UPDATE:  Now I'm back to typing okay, but before I go back to doing any more gardening, I will have to bundle up the finger again.  So, where were we? Ah, the canning thing. I have to admit right here that Twyla is the one doing the canning.  I might help out with some of the prep work, like peeling and slicing, but she's the one who pays attention to the recipes and the time in the hot water bath. I chose to write about canning today because I went to a seminar last night at the church on butchering domestic and game animals, and the subject came up in passing when the risks of contamination were talked about.

Life is full of risks, but they are manageable when one uses caution and that rare thing called "common sense."  Sure, there is a possibility that you could get botulism poisoning from canned goods, even from store bought, factory produced food, but there are warning signs.  It wasn't that long ago that I opened a national brand can of tomato sauce and it turned out to be under pressure.  "DANGER!" I threw that can away.  Just use your head.

sliced for drying on silicone silpat

Canning is one of the safest and easiest ways to preserve your own food for long term storage.  With rare exceptions, most bad bacteria and other microbes that can harm you will easily die when exposed to temperatures of 140° - 160° F. Canning involves immersing the food and container in boiling water for anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes.  As the jars and lids cool down and you hear that distinctive pop as the vacuum sucks the lid down tight, you know you've got a good, airtight seal.

Apples, Tomatoes dehydrated

Another method of preserving food that takes up a lot less space is dehydration. For example; tomatoes are about 90% water, and it's the existence of that water that provides a medium for the microbes to rapidly decompose the fruit. Remove almost all that water and the remaining acid and other protective components will make the food last longer.  Vacuum pack the product and it will last for years.

Volume wise, this method is great because of how much food can be packed in such a small area. The jar of tomatoes you see on the right is approximately a dozen, and they are not even tightly packed.  I could add almost a dozen more and re-vacuum pack the jar.  There are more than a dozen apples in the other jar.  All the nutrition is there with no added chemicals or artificial preservatives.  These were done just using the gentle heat of the pilot light in the oven, since we have propane for the stove and oven and central heat.  And while the tomato is not really "sun-dried" I dare anyone to tell me they can taste the difference.

dehydrated tomatoes

Since we only have a couple of silicone silpats, another way to lay out fruits and veggies for drying without sticking, is to crumple a sheet of aluminum foil and then flatten it out, then swab it with a vegetable oil.  You don't want to cut the tomatoes too thin. You will be amazed how a slice of tomato nearly a quarter inch thick will shrink down to a paper thin piece.  My next project is to create a dehydrating box out of some relatively cheap materials.  I plan on taking step-by-step photographs of the process, in case anyone would like to duplicate it.

Another thing you should know is that there are lots of things that don't really even need refrigeration.  Chances are that everybody reading this has mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup in their fridge.  None of those things need to be in there.  Seriously. Did you know that even eggs can go two to three weeks in just moderately cool temperatures.

Stay tuned.

First Year Success: Straw Bales

This first picture shows our harvest from just one Sunday morning two weeks ago. Cucumbers, from only six plants, tomatoes from about six plants - with many more green ones still hanging - yellow squash, and jalapenos. (Danged if I can remember the ASCII code that lets me put that little squiggle worm over the n.) We have had this wonderful crop from a very small space of ground because we stumbled upon the idea of straw bale gardening. When I get better at inserting that html code stuff here, I'll make it easy for you to just click on the word or phrase to do the linky thing, but for now, if you just google the phrase, you can find several pages that tell you more. However, we want to share with you what we have learned.

If you think it's too late to start this process, you'd be wrong. There are plenty of winter type crops that you could be practicing with soon. I'm going to be planting cabbage, lettuce, mustard, broccoli, and a few other cold hardy plants, plus more spinach. I'll be using the remains of the straw bales that provided the crop you see above. But first, some background.

Why do this straw bale gardening?

Here in the mountains of North Georgia, unless you live on an old flood plain next to a river or a creek, your basic ground is going to be red clay and sand with lots of quarts and granite mixed in. It doesn't make for the best basic soil to grow most food plants. We've only been here for a year. Actually, I didn't move up here to be with Twyla until February, or Febu-ugly, as I like to call it. When we started discussing the garden plans it became apparent that preparing the ground would be slow, back-breaking work, and while I'm in pretty good shape for my age, I'm no spring chicken and I did work my way back from having had a herniated disk in my back years ago, so I didn't like the idea of swinging a pick-axe for hours to get a few square feet of arable land. Twyla discovered this straw bale thing on the internet, and after reading about it and discussing it, it made sense.  No digging, except to level the bales, which means no deep digging.  In the photo above, you see we laid out the bales in single rows.  While it worked out okay, I will not be doing that in the future because as the bales decompose, they do so unevenly and the tomatoes tend to fall over.  Also, the squash plants want to stretch out and put down extra roots, so a broader base would be helpful.  Therefore, we will be doubling the bales together, long-side to long-side, with a bit more space between the bales to walk. This more recent picture shows why.


The tomato plant could have used another couple of feet away from the yellow squash.  That is one huge yellow squash plant in the foreground. There is one zuccinni plant behind the yellow squash.  This one yellow squash plant has provided up to 15 squash and is still producing and blooming. For contrast, I took a photo of the yellow squash plants that were just planted in the soil along the steps on the west side of the house. We've only collected about four squash total from the eight plants that were just stuck in the regular dirt and provided with mulch and fertilizer. The cucumber plants (6) were most prolific. We have harvested at least 120 and there are still more to come and there are still blossoms coming out.

Not a pretty sight, huh?

If you want to try this straw bale thing, get the bales at least ten days ahead of time.  Position and level them carefully, with the understanding that they are going to decompose and collapse. Don't undo the baling twine.  Soak them with water at least once a day, everyday.  Expect to see mushrooms pop up after a while.  I actually got some porcinis come up and ate a few of them.  If you are sure you know what you are doing when it comes to identifying mushrooms, it shouldn't be a problem.  If in doubt, don't.

When the weather starts to turn a little cool, and I know that the existing vines are all spent, I'm going to salvage all the straw bale material and create new beds for growing spinach, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, mustard greens and more.  I will turn the front porch into a greenhouse with clear plastic sheeting.  That will be after we celebrate Sukkot.(Feast of Tabernacles).

If you have any questions, please leave it in the comments. I'd be happy to help.

Shalom v'berakhot Adonai,

Moshe