Sprouting Out Tomato Seeds For This Year's Garden

There are lots of seeds still in their little damp paper towels getting sprouted. Yesterday I took the varieties that have sprouted and moved them into their little seedling pots.

I saved egg shells to use for this, we will see how well that works.  We have a lot of calcium in our water, but places that don't might find this technnique useful to help prevent Blossom End Rot.

There are several previous posts about how to start tomato plants from seed. Click here to go to the first one, and when you get there, you'll see links to the others. :-)

We had thunder storms night before last, and this is a part of the country where the saying applies: "Thunder in February, Frost in April"!  I never plant before Easter because of late frosts, but I always start a lot of extra plants in case my first planting freezes to death!

Moving My Tomato Seeds Into Peat Pots

The little sprouts are ready to go into the seed starting medium now! :-)

Starting My Tomato Seeds Indoors

It is that time of year again!  Once more I am using "Byron B's Weak Tea" method. I did this last year and nearly every seed sprouted and grew. Byron B is a member of the TomatoMania Yahoo Group, and I learned about this from reading the archives there.

Planning This Years Garden & Reviewing Last Year's

In which I talk about the things I learned last year: what worked (Deer Netting!!!!) and what didn't (Oddly colored Heirloom Tomatoes!!!), and what I am looking for when I start going through the seed catalogs this year. Also, some tips on buying onion plants for Southern gardens.  If you like the video, please give a "thumbs up" and subscribe on You Tube. Thank you so much :-)

Black-eyed Peas with Sausage

This is an old favorite that I often made for supper year round when the kids were home. It is an easy dish to make after work. May God bless you and yours, and all of us, and may God Bless America again in 2015.

West Texas Baked Steak - An Easy and Thrifty Homecooked Meal

This is an old standby at our house. Low fat, super easy to make after work! Enjoy, and thank you for subscribing over on You Tube - it is appreciated :-)

How To Make Gumbo For a Big Crowd - and a Garlic Peeling Tip!

How To Make Fried Green Tomatoes, Served With Cream Gravy

We had fried green tomatoes and fried chicken livers for supper the other evening. Oh and cream gravy. I make livers fairly often but had never made fried green tomatoes (my family made chow chow out of the green ones). Paul told me how to do it and they turned out great, I am a fan!!!! 

Green Tomatoes are available early in the season when the vines have put on fruit but it hasn't ripened, sometimes throughout the summer, but especially in the Fall. Tomato plants and fruit will not survive a frost, so as temperatures drop, we have to remove the still-green fruit from the vines. These can be stored to ripen slowly over the winter (I have written before about how to do that), but that is also a perfect time to fry them up and enjoy them like this. 

Start with Green Tomatoes. They are very tart, but you can also use "Not Quite Ripe" - turning but still very firm - tomatoes for a sweeter taste. The cream gravy counters the acidic taste very nicely too. It you have had them in past, and they were too sour for you. try them with gravy and see if it doesn't make all the difference! :-)

 Slice them thickly, about 1/3 of an inch thick.

Dip tomato slices in flour, then into an egg wash (one egg beaten with 1/4 cup milk), then into bread crumbs. Let sit in a single layer on a cookie sheet  for a few minutes so the coatings will stick, then fry slowly until nice and brown. 

I used bacon grease to fry them in. About 1/4 inch deep grease in a skillet, get it hot and add the tomato slices in a single layer. Turn the stove down so that they sizzle but not very quickly, you want to fry these slowly. When brown on one side, turn them over and brown the other side. 

Drain on brown paper or even a wire rack, or paper towels. Serve warm. We especially like them smothered with cream gravy. Yummmmmm!!!!

Does everyone know how to make cream gravy or would it help if I added instructions?

SUCCESS!!!! Beautiful Heirloom Tomatoes

I set a goal last Winter, in the cold, here at home looking after my husband in his slow and steady recovery from a life-saving surgery, to learn How to Grow Tomatoes. I have made several posts about it, and will add links here but for now you can search the blog to find them.  Learned how to choose varieties, selected them and raised the plants from seed under fluorescent lights on the kitchen bar, set them out and mourned when they froze to death, set out the "leftovers" and watched them impatiently as they reached a stage of growth and then seemed to go dormant in this funny cool Spring.

 And then, God sent the rain. Glorious abundant rain. It started with a nice shower, then a couple of weeks later, eight inches of water poured from the sky onto my garden and everything took off! Things sprounted that I had forgotten I had even planted.  The tomatoes GREW!

Watched again as they bloomed and filled with greem fruit - fruit that sat on the plants as though waiting for an invitation to dress for dinner.  I wondered if they would ever ripen. They just grew larger and continued to bloom and make even more fruit.

And finally last week, they started in. First a fruit here, and another there. Now, I am gathering a gallon a day. That is half a peck - a kind soul on the tomato mania group let me know that a peck equals 2 gallons.
We are having a blast tasting these beautiful fruits. I've never tasted many of these heirlooms, so have been imagining their flavors all Winter.  They do not disappoint. The black and purple ones are rich and sweet and complex. The pink ones are perfect and balanced. The red tomatoes are acidic and tomato-ey. They are all wonderful.

I sell some at our County's Farmer's Market each Saturday morning, and have a little table set up outside the house for excess during the week.  Most importantly, I am canning the excess, so we will have our own tomatoes for the winter. More on that in another post. For now, I am just enjoying the harvest!

O Tomato! Beautiful Heirloom Varieties I Am Gathering Now!

Tomatoes here are finally ripening and I am gathering about a peck or more each day.   I lost track of what tomatoes I have where since replanting them after the freeze, so as they ripen I am looking back at my lists to figure out what they are. We are having a lot of fun tasting these different varieties that we have never had before.

Chocolate Cherry - Just today I picked the first 4 of these, have not  tasted them yet. Weirdly, all of my cherry tomatoes are running kind of behind the full sized fruit. Maybe they will keep coming all summer though. 

Brandywine or Cherokee Purple? - I have a couple of plants with nice big 8 ounce pinkish tomatoes that have green shoulders, and the green is as sweet as the pink. Great flavor, nice and sweet. 

Rutgers are doing well too for me, making big red orange fruits. I think they would be great for fried green tomatoes because they are so meaty. 

Japanese Black Trifele (anyone know how to pronounce that?) is Paul's favorite so far. Wow, what flavor. I have gotten 6 tomatoes from the plant so far, and the new fruit is a long way from ripe. This is them, below - they have a nice mahogany brown color when fully ripe, and delicious complex flavor. 

Porter are awfully pretty and uniform. They look like pink eggs, weigh about 2 ounces, and have a good flavor. I am saving seed from them to plant again too.  Look how attractive they are in the two photos below!  They are producing to beat the band. 

Henderson Pink Ponderosa is doing great for me and I like them. They are a nice size, uniform and attractive. 

When you don't spray for bugs, the bugs do share the produce. This photo below shows different problems my tomatoes have - not many fruit have these issues, but a few.

The big Brandywine or Cherokee Purple (I have never see either - help is welcome) with green shoulders is one the grasshoppers have been snacking on. See how they kind of "mowed" along it?  That portion can be cut off and we can still eat the tomato but no one would want to pay for it.

To the left of it, in the top center, is a Pink Ponderosa that some kind of caterpillar or grub has drilled into - just as they have done to the Homestead tomato on the far left and the little cherry tomato.  These have to be thrown away because the damage inside is far greater than the damage outside. I don't even bother trying to "save" these fruits.

The white papery patch on the big Rutgers is sunscald. Although I let my plants sprawl, some are still exposed to constant sun, and it has been in the 90s all week. I don't see this on every variety, but perhaps these large fruits are more sensitive for some reason.

Yeeecccch. Enough of ugly tomatoes. Here is a prettier picture to end with, These gorgeous Costoluto Genovese are ripening...

I am mixing the varieties all together when canning, just using whatever is ripe to fill quart jars. That way I can put up two or three quarts at a time instead of trying to hold them. I am doing a water bath using my stock pot with a small rack, instead of my canner. Since I have a smooth top range, this works well for me.  

Remember to follow the instructions at the National Center for Home Food Preservation in ALL of your canning methods to be sure you are preserving safely. PickYourOwn.org also has a lot of great recipes and instructions.  Both are linked  from my sidebar, over to the right.  I don't get anything for recommending these - it is important that we learn how to look after ourselves in safe ways so that we feel completely confident in our own knowledge and ability. 

Tomato Vines Loaded with Green Fruit: Heirloom "Costoluto Genovese"

I have only picked a couple of ripe tomatoes so far, but the vines are all full of green fruit. This variety I grew from seed that I bought from Park Seed. They are called "Costoluto Genovese", an Italian heirloom tomato that is supposed have an intense flavor that makes them good for canning and sauce. I love the lobed shapes on these! 

I planted many different varieties, and in the first planting I had a nice chart of which were where. But after they all froze to death and I had to scurry to replant, I didn't track placement. So until they ripen, it is hard to tell which is which. These Genovese ones are unmistakeable though.