Garden 2020 Update, Part II
Here we go with the next installment of this year’s backyard garden. If you missed the first part, you can catch up here. Onward to the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant!
Tomatoes went in early, because they were getting so big under the grow lights that I felt that they would have been stressed and less robust if I waited to another week or two get them in the ground. I did keep them warm with my Devo hats (see blog post about that here) and that did the trick. In fact, between that and the early June heat, they set up a lot of fruit early and my first tomatoes came in about a month before they did last year and went gangbusters all summer.
It finally dawned on me last year that I needed to tie up my tomatoes as they grew rather than when they were collapsing under the weight of their fruit—doh! I had been using some soft vinyl tape but I’m increasingly and painfully aware of how much non-biodegradable materials I use regularly so, when that ran out, I switched to fabric. I have vague memories from my youth of vegetable gardeners using cloth ties so I dipped into my rag bag and pulled out cotton t-shirts to use.
Using a rotary cutter, I cut strips about 1” wide and tied the tomatoes to the surrounding support as they grew. The fabric is soft so that it won’t cut into the plant stems and flexible enough to accommodate the stems as they grow. Made a huge difference and no disasters with the plant trunk accordioning under the weight. Only took me seven years to figure that out! (Disaster photos from last year here)
I plant a lot of plum tomatoes and can most of them (and oven-dry a fair amount to use like sun-dried) and have heretofore planted indeterminate varieties. That means that they produce over a long period of time, so that the harvest is continual. There are determinate varieties that come in all at once and then they’re done. I’m starting to consider that may be the better route for canning, so that I have lots to do all at once, rather than small batches over a period of weeks.
But boy, I pulled in loads of tomatoes from my plants: two each Cherokee Purple and Jersey Boy slicing tomatoes, eight plum tomatoes, and one cherry tomato plant (which is more than enough for me). In fact, the cherry tomato must be 12 feet long at this point. It grew up through the top of the support, and I draped it over the top of the adjacent supports and it’s grown up the entire length of my 12’ row, forming what I’ve taken to calling my tomato allée.
I’ve been oven-drying those and giving them away in bulk, there have been so many, still now in mid-October. (I like this cherry tomato focaccia recipe from an ancient Vegetarian Times magazine, but I use waaay more tomatoes than they call for). I also made a delicious tomato and corn pie from one of my favorite cooking blogs, Smitten Kitchen. So worth making.
We came close to a frost a few weeks ago, and I pulled in the green Cherokee Purple and Jersey Boys in case Mr. Jack nipped. He did not, and I was faced with several pounds of green tomatoes. They will continue to ripen if left to it, although not as delicious as ripening in the sun on the vine. A colleague had mentioned a savory green tomato cobbler not long ago, and I used up a lot of the green ones in that recipe, which you can find here. It was quite good and a new way to use them.
This is also a bumper year for my Hungarian wax peppers and I had more in the freezer at summer’s mid-point than I did for the whole growing season last year. They’re smaller than the bell peppers, which works better for my shorter growing season, and have some heat to them. They can be erratic in their hotness, which means sometimes you can get a real surprise when eating them. But they were the happiest that they’ve ever been in my back yard, a full foot or more taller than ever before and, although slowing down, are still producing here in October.
Eggplant was also way ahead of previous years and produced twice or more fruit than ever before. I plant a variety called Rosa Bianco, and they are delicious—creamy texture without a trace of bitterness. This year, as I was snipping back my peppers and basil to encourage bushier plants, it occurred to me that eggplant could probably use some early treatment. I discovered that, indeed, eggplant benefits from pruning the way tomatoes are treated, removing lower leaves up until the first flower to encourage one strong main stem. They certainly seem to react well to it. I have frozen enough sliced eggplant for two rounds of parmigiana, and two gallons of cubed for a yet-to-be-determined meal. I am bringing in two today on October 10 to prepare for dinner to finish up their season. There are some small fruits on the plants but I doubt they will have time to mature; we’ll see. (The dish I just cooked up is from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, the lentils with broiled eggplant. Delicious!
Still more to come from the garden but I’ll wrap up this installment here, with zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, Swiss chard, kale, and tons of herbs to go! I hope you can see why the writing about the garden took a back seat to managing the garden this year, and that you’ll stick around for the rest of the story, and also for what I did with it all!