This year's tomatoes

Hey! I'm looking at my stats, and I'm on track to hit my 100,000th visit sometime in the next two or three weeks. Woo hoo! I'll have to come up with some kind of giveaway or prize for whoever that person is. Stay tuned!

On other fronts, this weekend was the big Seattle Tilth plant sale. My friend Erica and I were two of the thousand or so people who stood in the rain lined up all around a park the size of a city block to get in at the opening bell, all because they are such a fantastic source for heirloom tomatoes and eggplants and peppers and other things that you just can't start from seed in Seattle because of the short length of the truly hot part of our otherwise long gardening year.

So, here are my thoughts on tomatoes this year:

• Last year sucked for tomato growing because the very end of the summer, when it's usually 90 degrees for weeks on end, was unusually cold and rainy, so most of the long season tomatoes never came through.
  
• Last year my soil mix sucked rocks, which didn't help.
  
• The few late season ones that did decently were the ones I had in the ground and not in pots, because they stayed a little warmer. So anything late goes in the ground this year.
  

Therefore I'm planting almost entirely early and mid-season tomatoes this year. And I've mixed a lot more compost and some lime and some tomato fertilizer in the soil in each pot this year. So that should go better.

Here are the tomatoes I'm planting this year:

Cherries:

• Isis Candy, Indeterminate, 67 days, yellow cherry (repeat from last year)
• Sweet Million, Indeterminate, 60-75, Red cherry
• Chocolate Cherry, Indeterminate, 70, Black cherry
• Sungold, Indeterminate, 65 days, Yellow cherry (repeat from last year)
• Peacevine, Indeterminate, 70 days, Red cherry

Early:

• Sasha’s Altai, 59, Indeterminate (but small), red
• Urbikany 65, Determinate (small), red
• Cosmonaut Volkov, 68, Indeterminate, red
• Langley’s Silver Tiger, 70, Indeterminate, Red/yellow
• Grushovka, Indeterminate, 72, Red (repeat from last year)

Mid:

• Tuscany Roma, Indeterminate, 78, Red
• Green Zebra, Indeterminate, 75-80, Green (repeat from last year)
• Juane Flamme, Indeterminate, 75, Orange (repeat from last year)
• Valencia, Indeterminate, 75, Orange
• Debarao, Indeterminate, 72, Red paste
• Black plum, Indeterminate, 79, black

Late:

• Mr. Stripey, Indeterminate, 80 (repeat from last year)
• Brandywine, Indeterminate, 80+ (repeat from last year)

And yes, for those of you counting, that's one more than last year. Plus four eggplants and three peppers. And scallions.

I'm not insane. Really. Although this year's growing season is off to an unusually cool start so I suppose I could be kidding myself that this year might turn out well.

End of tomato season and a recipe

Tomato season is pretty much over here in Seattle, in what seems a few weeks earlier than last year. There hasn't been a frost yet, but daytime temperatures have dipped down to the low sixties at most, often high fifties, and although we're having some gorgeous fall weather, it just isn't hot enough now for much more to ripen.

I'm okay with it. Tomato season is an intense, nearly religious experience for us here, and by the end of it, having stuffed myself on tomatoes every single day of the whole, entire summer and devoted unbelievable amounts of time and energy to buying, planting, staking, roping up, pruning, picking suckers off of, spraying, harvesting, and eating tomatoes, I'm ready for the change of seasons. The ol' circle of life. Time to buy squash and make soup out of root vegetables. I'm down with it.

I've taken the radical (for me) step of taking some of the plants down early, which I don't usually do - but most of them are done producing or nearly so, and tomato plants make up for their early season gorgeousness by becoming blighted, rotted, gnarly eyesores in the early fall. And when you have fifteen blighted, rotted, gnarly, eyesores on your front porch, it makes a statement. That statement is, "Hey, someone call the health department!" or maybe "Don't let your kids trick-or-treat at that house."

Gone are both of the Sungolds, the Taxi and Glacier, the Grushovka, and the Silvery Fir. Severely pruned back to just a few remaining branches with ripening fruit are the Dona, Black Prince, Green Zebra, and Stripey. The ones in the ground are faring better, not rotting and dying like their potted counterparts, so I've left those for now - Isis, Jaune Flamme, and Brandywine. But I don't expect much more.

I'll post tasting notes later about which ones are coming back next year and which ones aren't.

Last weekend I picked about sixty tomatoes - mostly small ones, but they filled an entire collander - and made a huge pot of one of the best pasta sauces I've ever had. So, so good. I like my pasta sauce simple - nothing fancy, not a lot of spices. We froze a couple portions to bring some joy to a cold, rainy winters day a few months hence.

Here's the simple recipe I use:

Basic Pasta Sauce

1. Seed a bunch of tomatoes by cutting them in half horizontally and swiping them out with your fingers. (Doesn't have to be perfect but the more the better - the seeds make the sauce slightly bitter.) Chop the up roughly.
   
2. Heat up a couple tablespoons (I never measure it) olive oil in a big saute pan on medium.
   
3. Slice up 2-3 onions in a rough chop and saute medium-low for a really long time, stirring occasionally - let them turn all brown and caramely over at least 45 minutes. Sprinkle with a little salt to help them break down. Patience here is the most important step.
   
4. If you want garlic, add it for the last few minutes before you put the tomatoes in and saute briefly. I use 3-4 cloves chopped up.
   
5. Add a hunk of butter (2 tb or so), melt it down into the onions, then add the tomatoes. Stir and raise the heat a little to get them started with breaking down. I often take a potato masher and smoosh them up a bit at this point, just to help make it more saucelike and less like whole pieces of tomatoes.
   
6. Add seasonings if you want them - I often use just a big hunk of dried or fresh basil and nothing else, but oregano is good and you could go nuts and add all kinds of other things -- and simmer on med-low for 45 minutes or so.
   

It'll get really soupy from all the liquid in the tomatoes, so don't feel like you need to add any broth or water. I always feel like I should at first and then am glad I didn't. You can also cook it down for longer if you want it to dry up a bit. Other recipes often add sugar, too, but with really fresh homegrown tomatoes this is really delicious.

Garden notes

Just a quick post to note how much I'm loving my little Fairytale Eggplant that's planted out front. I've always avoided trying to grow eggplants because I mentally classified them as things that can't really be grown in Seattle's semi-cool summer season. But this plant, with its short maturity date of 50 days, has done just great. I've now picked and enjoyed about nine eggplants off it and there are at least that many left to come.

Next year, I'm going to put in several of them.

I don't think I've ever had a fresh-picked eggplant before this -- and wow, what a revelation that is. They're so SWEET! So unbitter. So tender. I'm in love.

I've been bemoaning the tomato season lately -- as I mentioned yesterday, it's been chilly and un-Augusty here lately, and it's hurting the tomatoes, I'm sure of it. This is August, a time when Seattle usually goes into its desert phase of 90- to 100-degree days and no rain or clouds for the next three months. Instead, it's about 62 most of the time at the peak of the afternoon, and in the fifties at night. That's pleasant enough for people like me who hate it hot, but the tomatoes, they like it warmer than this. They're supposed to be baking in the sun right now, growing plump and fat and warm and red. And that isn't happening.

The same varieties that last year grew to eight feet tall have maxed out this year at around five feet. In my yard, anyhow. My friend Erica has giants of the same varieties, bought the same day in the same place -- so who knows. She used more fertilizer than me, and I used a weird soil mix that might have been a mistake. Next year, I'm not using the soilbuilder.

All that said, though, I'm getting lots of tomatoes, so I guess I shouldn't complain. I went out tonight to pick some sungolds and found that just about all of the other plants also had ripe tomatoes. There were literally more to pick than we could have eaten tonight, so I left about half for the next day or two. We've now had at least a few fruits from everything except the Brandywine (should be a couple more weeks), the Taxi (and it's close! just days away) and the Principe Borghese.

Today we had the very first of the Jaune Flamme, the Isis Candy, the Green Zebra, and the Black Prince. All were lovely. The only disappointment so far in the taste department are the Grushovka -- it's mushy and mealy -- and the Silvery Fir, a favorite of years' past that's just doing nothing for me this year except excelling in the mushy/mealy department too.

Tomatoes in pots, part two

Hey! People are mailing me tomato questions. Cool. :) Here's a couple recent ones:

A recent commenter asked:
Q: I have a tomato plant in a large pot. I was out of town Friday through Sunday and I gave it water on Friday before I left. When I got home it was completed wilted over and fallen on the ground. This caused the stem to bend and break. It has about a dozen tomatoes on it. I staked it up and gave it lots of water, but it doesn't appear to be comeing back. Can I cut it off where it cracked and replant it?Thanks for your help!

A: At this point in the season, you're not likely to get more tomatoes if you cut it off and let the plant start over. Although it would probably regrow, it would take another 75 days (or whatever the growing length is before this particular variety fruits) for it to send up new branches, blossom, and ripen. Plus the new plant would probably be small and bushy rather than tall like the original.

My advice - leave it as it is and see what happens. In years past, I've had big branches laden with fruit crack almost all the way off the plant because they weren't supported well enough, and stay connected to the plant by just a thread. When I've left them in place, most of the time those fruits have still managed to grow red and ripen with whatever little bit of nourishment they can still draw. Your plant won't necessarily look good, but you might get a bit of fruit from it.

And who knows -- maybe a new stalk will grow at the same time and you can have your tomato and eat it too. Nothing to lose, at this point, by trying to have it both ways.

Q: Help, my tomatoes are ripening but they have big, unsightly brown mushy spots on the bottom. What is this?

A: Blossom end rot, the bane of tomato-growers everywhere. Some varieties are more prone to this than others, but I always see a bit of this early in the season. There are a variety of theories on this -- some think it's caused by plants that have been exposed to drought, some think it has to do with too much or too little calcium. Another theory is poorly-developed root systems. What I do know is I see it every year, usually just a little bit on a few plants here and there, but I have seen it take almost all of the tomatoes, all season, from one particular variety I grew last year. That was extremely frustrating.

Multiple theories often abound on how to treat this, but I'm with the people who recommend doing nothing, aside from making sure your plants are well-watered and perhaps mulched if it's unusually hot. Usually, blossom end rot affects just the first few fruits that ripen on a plant. Pull them off as soon as you notice them and throw them away, and pretty soon you'll see tomatoes free from rot. Accept the heartache of throwing away your very first full size tomatoes that have grown ripe. There will be more.

Me, I just tossed my first ripened tomato from the Dona variety because of end rot. None of the other plants are showing any sign of it yet. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Tomatoes!

Look - the Glaciers, the earliest-ripening of this year's crop, are turning red! In just days we'll be carving up the first tomato of the season. Hallelujah!

Tomatoes In Pots - A Primer

A little tomato primer, just because.

First, what's this determinate vs. indeterminate stuff? Does it matter?
Yes it does. You need to know what kind you have before you plant.

• Determinate tomatoes are smaller plants, bear fruit for a shorter time, and sometimes don't need staking to hold them up. (The no-staking part isn't always true, depending on how prolific they are and how big their fruit is.) You can plant these in slightly smaller pots and not suffer too badly for it, but you do still need to give them space.
  
• Indeterminate tomatoes tend to be much larger - they grow bigger and bloom for a longer season than their determinate cousins. They definitely need staking, and they can only be grown in really large pots. Most of the great varieties seem to be indeterminates.

What do the numbers mean?

When someone describes a variety as "indeterminate, 75 days", that means that it will bear ripened fruit about 75 days after transplant. So even if it's been in your dining room window sill for a month, the clock doesn't start ticking until you've got it in its pot.

It's good to get a mix of early season and late season tomatoes. Early season tomatoes will have numbers ranging from 55 - 70. Late season tomatoes will be more towards 85 or 90 days from planting. Middle is, um, in the middle. Get a good combination and you'll have something ripening from July through the end of October.

Is there any advantage to getting them in the ground earlier rather than later?

Doesn't seem to be, at least in Seattle. (I suspect this is different elsewhere in the country.) They'll survive being planted a little early, as long as there's no frost, but in my experience it seems like they just go dormant until about the second week of May anyways and don't grow, bear, or ripen any sooner than tomatoes planted mid-May. I plant mine about the first week of May - right now.

How do you plant a tomato in a pot?

1. Get a big pot, at least fifteen gallons. If your varieties are determinate, you might be able to go a little smaller, but for big, sprawling indeterminates, you need large pots. I use medium-sized half-barrels for most of mine, and a few specialty pots from Gardeners' Supply.

2. Get a good soil mix - nothing fancy, just half compost, half potting soil, one handful of a good tomato fertilizer. I use this one.

3. Carefully strip the branches off the lower half of your tomato start so that you have a long, skinny stem.

4. Add the plant, burying it up to its little neck:

• If your pot is deep rather than shallow and wide, dig a deep hole and insert your tomato plant so that only its top few inches are above ground. All of the stem that's below ground will sprout roots, giving you a great root system, and the above ground stalk will shot back up in no time.
  
  
• If your pot is shallow and wide, it's a little trickier. Dig your hole to the bottom and then sideways, and set your plant in almost on its side and off center, gently angling it so that the stalk emerges from the soil at about the center of the pot. Be careful or you'll end up snapping it in half! Place the plant in at an angle and then brush dirt up against it to help return it to an upright position rather than actually trying to bend the stalk.
  
  At first it will look like it's growing crooked, but it will straighten up in a few days as it finds the sun, and again you'll get a great root system.
  
  
• Water deeply.

That's it!

Any other tips for success?

• Pull off suckers religiously for potted plants. For one, this keeps your plants to a more manageable size, and for another, you want your plants to focus on growing fruit, not growing many, many leaves. Here's a great guide to pruning to help.
  
  
• Don't fertilize too much -- fertilize when you plant, and maybe a light topdressing once more when they start to set fruit. If you add much more, your tomato plant will grow huge, beautiful, dense foliage that will be the envy of all your neighbors... but much less fruit. We don't care about the leaves. We want tomatoes. Right?
  
  
• Water twice a day when it's hot - August and September for sure. Tomatoes in pots need more watering than tomatoes in the ground. I soak each pot twice in a single watering. More than that and they tend to crack.
  
  
• Don't water too too much in late spring and early summer, especially here in Seattle where it rains on and off through June. Let them dry out just a little between waterings, then water again.
  
  
• Don't wait too long to put your stakes or cages in. Last year I put it off for much too long and couldn't get all of them properly caged. This year I put them in the day I planted, even though the tiny little plants won't need them for some time. Better safe than sorry.
  
  
• If you're using red plastic mulch (which I like), don't put it in until mid-June. Here in Seattle, it rains so much prior to that that I've had pots grow fuzzy white mold underneath the plastic if its set out prior to that. I don't know if it hurts them or not, but that year wasn't my best season ever so I think it had an effect.
  

I'll add to this list as I think of more.

This year's tomatoes

So this year I got lucky -- I just happened to be at Swanson's in mid-April on the very day that they put their tomatoes out. This was about two weeks earlier than I realized they got their starts in, which might explain why I've had such trouble getting the varieties I wanted in previous years. This year, I got everything I wanted, because I was literally dogging the employee's footsteps as she was putting them out for display.

Yes, I am that person.

Several people, including my friend Kate, have been asking me what tomatoes are good to grow in Seattle. Here's what's on the plate for this season at Zalkan's Haven for Wayward Tomatoes -- and yes, there are fourteen varieties on this list.

I did, in fact, swear last year after reaching an all time high of eleven tomato plants that enough was enough and there was no way I was buying that many again. And then this year happened, and they were just so beautiful, and they smell so good (nothing smells as good as tomato leaves), and they all sounded so tasty and wonderful that I just couldn't help myself.

My justification? Having ripped an eight foot around New Zealand Flax out of my front planting bed, along with a half dead boxwood border, I now have room to put some of these in the ground, so I don't actually need fourteen pots on my front walk. I need eleven pots. Same as last year. So there.

Ok - this year's varieties, with notes:

Cherry tomatoes:

• Sungold, two plants - a repeat guest from seasons past. These are my absolute favorite cherries, and I've finally done good on my vow to buy multiple plants. Maybe this year some of them will actually make it all the way to the kitchen instead of just getting eaten right off the plant like candy. Small orange cherry tomatoes that taste like sugar, huge sprawling plants that produce like crazy - can't go wrong. Indeterminate, huge and must be staked well, 57 days. (Early! Yay! And they fruit right up until the end of the season too.)
  
  
• Isis Candy - a newcomer. Indeterminate, 67 days. You can see a picture here. I probably bought them because of the word candy in the title.
  
  
• Principe Borghese - a newcomer. One of the classic plum-shaped, sauce-makin' tomatoes. Determinate, 75 days. I have high hopes for this one - it's been on the "wanted but couldn't find" list in years past.
  

Full size:

• Silvery Fir - a repeat for several years now. I bought two but broke one in the planting process, so I'm down to one. I love these because they can be grown in a very small pot - the plant only gets about a foot high but they grow huge, baseball-sized red tomatoes that taste great. I'll probably replace the broken one in a few days and get back up to two. Determinate, 52 days.
  
  
• Dona - a repeat from two years back, but one that I've never grown out in the front yard where it's sunniest. It did ok in 2005 but I'm hoping it does lots better this year with southern exposure. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
• Taxi - this is a new one for me; bright yellow baseball-sized fruit. Determinate, 65 days.
  
  
• Brandywine - I grew this in 2004 but overwatered it and had a lot of cracking. The few fruits I got, though, were wonderful and I've always wanted to try it again. It seems to show up on everyone's list of favorite tomatoes every year. This year it's one of the brave few going in the ground. I hope the slugs don't eat it. Indeterminate, 90 days.
  
  
• Jaune Flammee - newcomer. Orange. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
• Green Zebra - repeat from last year, one of our favorites. These are sooooo beautiful - see last year's photo of these in my garden. Last year its pot was too small but it still produced gainfully. This year, it gets a barrel all to itself. Go, Zebra, go. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
• Black Prince - I've grown this before but I'm not sure which season. I always put in one of the dark, chocolate-y looking varieties. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
  Anyone still reading? If you're not a tomato nut like me I realize this is probably not so interesting.
  
  
• Grushovka - another new one for me. Just sounded cool - pink, egg-shaped fruit. Smallish plant, supposedly. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
• Mr. Stripey - yay! I've been trying to get this, aka Tigerella, for years but it's always long gone before I get there. Oh man, I hope this plant does well. So pretty, so tasty. Mmmmmm. Indeterminate, 80 days.
  

What I didn't get was the Great White, last year's favorite and the most prolific producer of sauce-worthy tomatoes I've ever seen. Swanson's wasn't carrying it this year. But Seattle Tilth is, and their sale is this weekend. Can I attend another tomato sale and come home with only this one? I'm almost afraid to go.

And one final word of caution - only a few of these are repeats for me so I can't guarantee great performance in Seattle's weather. What I do know is that every year, I get somewhere around a dozen tomato plants, and five or six of them do fantastic. Those become repeats. This is my fifth tomato season, so I'm continuing the trial and error approach and discovering new varieties I can do well.

I will, of course, continue to report on how that's going. Meanwhile, my neighbors think I'm crazy as all the cages and pots go up in front of the house.

But it's worth it. Nothing like a good, home-grown tomato.

Tomatoes

I haven't posted my usual paean to tomatoes this year, aside from the post I made about planting them back in May. But I really should be bragging about them now, because my tomato crop is my only success this year; the entire rest of my yard has withered under a huge onslaught of lack of energy for watering. My strategy of putting all the tomatoes on the porch or on the front walk, though, paid off - I can't get out of the house without seeing them, and I've faithfully watered them each and every morning. And we've been eating fresh ripe tomatoes for almost a month now.

The silver first were first, as usual - I love these plants. Huge, heavy, blood red tomatoes on a tiny little plant about the size of a small boxwood. Very tasty, no end rot, and the first to ripen every year. This one is looking a little past its prime by now while the other varieties are still just ramping up:


A few shots of the others that are doing well...

Seattle's Best, which I've never grown before, is a gorgeous variety - big, perfectly round tomatoes, completely rot or blemish free, and just an easy, trouble-free plant. If they taste as good as they look, I'll be growing these every year from now on. We're a day or two away from tasting the first of these - meanwhile here's a lovely closeup of one of the fruits:


The green zebra has been great too, and we've eaten one of them. We'll be harvesting these in a few days' time - definitely on the repeater list for next year:


The great whites have been prolific but haven't really ripened yet:


And these are from the mystery variety, the one I lost the tags for. Definitely not purple calabash, as I'd suspected, since they're quite red when they ripen. Gorgeous plant, just covered in fruit, but so far every single ripened fruit has been covered in end rot. I've thrown away about nine. Hoping this knocks off soon so I can eat some of these. I'll probably never know what type it was.


Black krim - also a late ripener:


Aside from that, the Tiny Tims were a big disappointment - bad tasting and stricken by some kind of plague, the Sun Golds are lovely as always and providing tons of fruit, and the Stupice has been okay. It did produce, but it's been a scraggly plant with only a few fruits on it. I think I put it in too small of a pot, which didn't help. Super Fantastic is doing fine but won't have anything ripe for a few more weeks; it's also struggling a bit with end rot on the early fruit, which I hope clears up.

Now I just need to find someone to water them while we're at the hospital, because a lot of these will keep producing through early October.

Heat stroke

Oh god, it's hot. All spring, people have been making comments to me about how much I was going to suffer having a baby when it got to be hot weather, and I thought they were nuts. But oh god, is it suddenly, unbearably hot. Normally I'm the person with a sweater on three quarters of the year, but the baby has turned me into a raging inferno who slept with the windows open in January, and now all of a sudden it's 85 degrees out, and every day the house gets a little bit warmer.

All I can think is that at least I'm not in Ohio, where this would be just the prelude to the REALLY hot weather coming later. Or Texas, with my sister. Then I'd really be hurting.

Brett was hit with a huge burst of energy today and spent the whole day scrubbing the basement, sorting stuff out of boxes, cleaning up the kitchen, vacuuming, emptying the dishwasher, buying groceries.

The cats and I, on the other hand, spent all day lying around like boneless chickens, in the shadiest, breeziest places we could find, trying not to so much as twitch a tail unless absolutely necessary, hatching up schemes in which people would bring us icy drinks.

Things I should have done today:

• Finally gotten the tomato cages up (third weekend in a row I've failed to do this)
• Weeded across the street (ditto)
• Cut back the wisteria (ditto)
• Watered the apple trees
• Visited my poor, neglected P-Patch plot
• Cleaned the fans I'm now using constantly
• Flea-dipped the cats (well, applied Advantage)
• Hung the pictures that have been sitting on the living room table for about a month
• Put together the stroller we just bought
• Put together the backing for the quilt
• Gone fabric shopping
• Gone out to buy that phone we need
• Mopped the kitchen

Things I actually did do:

• Watered the front plants at 7:30 a.m. when I couldn't sleep
• Napped
• Had breakfast with a good friend
• Napped
• Finished a book
• Whined about the heat
• Vacuumed the basement (my one productive task)
• Napped

And Brett, bless his heart, instead of complaining about my lack of efforts today, comes out when I'm finally vacuuming and says, "Are you ok? Do you need anymore assistance from me today? Are you up to this?"

He's so sweet.

Tomato dreaming

Went out and bought this year's tomato crop yesterday - it feels a little early to put them in, but we're leaving town for two weeks and I knew that all the heirloom varieties I wanted would be long gone from the retail arena by the time I got back. This, it turns out, was true - I still missed a few I wanted, and had slim pickings on a couple others. You non-tomato growers have no idea what a ravenous crowd we are.

My gardening activities are supposed to be somewhat scaled-back this year, giving my impending motherhood. Even so, I just can't not grow tomatoes. I went to the garden center intending to just buy a few modest plants and somehow bought even more than last year. My nod to practicality, though, is that:

• I tried to buy mostly early varieties - maybe I'll get to eat a few before giving birth
• I bought several very small varieties that don't need huge cages and gigantic pots
• They all have to fit on my front porch.

That last part is the key. I'm not going to be able to handle watering things in the front and back of the house every day this summer. Plus the tomatoes on the porch (south-facing, and against a wall) did tons better than the tomatoes in the backyard last year, producing far more and more flavorful fruit.

I figure even in my eighth and ninth months I should be able to stagger out the front door and turn a hose on some pots. Right? Why do I hear the laughter of experienced mothers everywhere? Just because I'll give birth before half of them ripen? Because watering anything will be the last thing on my mind when it's hot out and I'm as big as a house?

Well you may be right. But whatever hobbies or parts of my life to date I'm willing to give up or try to do less of to have the kid, this is one annual ritual I'm hoping to hold on to.

Here's what we're growing this year:

(excuse the gigantic space here that I can find no reason for in the raw HTML and scroll down to the table below)

	Two Silvery Firs - the only one I got two of, because they're perfect for small pots. Somehow, this tiny little plant that only gets to be about a foot high grows a huge amount of full-size tomatoes, relatively early in the season. It was one of my best last year.
	Great White - How cool is this? I went back a second day to get one of these, after reading up on it a little bit. You can make white pasta sauce with these babies. You can bet I'll be doing that.
	One Stupice - a potato-leave variety I've been wanting to try for years, but which disappears with lightning speed at the tomato sales each year. This year, I was only able to get a somewhat sickly-looking speciman because again, rabid Seattle tomato-growers had cleaned them out. But I'm hoping it recovers.
	One Green Zebra - another I've been trying to buy for years and always finding empty flats of. Got one! Yay! Never tasted one, but they're supposed to be great.
	Sungold - my favorite cherry tomato. I should've gotten two but they're just such huge plants; I couldn't justify it now that I'm trying to do all my tomato gardening on the porch.
	Seattle's Best - also new for me, and one I've been trying to get for a few years. I figure with a name like that, I should give it a shot.
	Black Plum Roma - a newcomer. I'm a sucker for the "black" and "purple" varieties.
	Super Fantastic - a repeat from last year, one of the better performers. Should do even better now that it's been promoted to the porch.
	Purple Calabash - picked this up just on a whim; it's just cool. I love these lumpy, misshapen heirlooms.
	Tiny Tim - another cherry, in a very small (for tomatoes) pot. Most of my cherry tomatoes never make it into the house; I tend to eat them right off the bush.
?	Plus... one I lost the identifying tag on. I think it's a Purple Cherokee, but we'll see. It will probably be the best and best tasting, and I'll have no idea what it is. I'm sure it will haunt me for years.

Garden news

Back to gardening for a moment.

First of all, we're about two seconds from having great big beautiful blooms on both our cherry and dogwood trees. Oddly enough, even though we're south-facing, most of the other trees around us have already bloomed. It's worth waiting for, though. The picture at left is the blooms on the fifty-year-old ornamental weeping cherry in our front yard.

Second, I've gotten a P-Patch! P-Patch is a local community garden program, with plots all over the city. My friend Jacki and I have been on the waiting list for two years now - there's that much demand! We're going to share a 10x10 plot in Ballard for this growing season.

Why, you may ask, do I need a P-Patch when I have two yards to play with? Well, both yards are the size of postage stamps and neither has a good place to put in a vegetable bed. I manage to eek out subsistence-level tomato growing in a few plots, but that's about all I can do here. Now I can grow all kinds of new things!

Finally, we got out today and dug out the troublesome climber rose at the old house (Kiss of Desire, photo of what it's supposed to look like here) and put in something a little more disease resistant. The KoD rose has been growing there for a few years, but (aside from reaching a nice size) has never done very well - it's been constantly plagued by one problem or another and has only produced four or five flowers a year. We dug it up and put in a Blaze, a much lower maintenance and more profusely blooming rose. It's nothing particularly unusual, more of an old standby, but I think it will do much better there.

Tip: when you plant roses, chop up two banana peels and put them at the bottom of a deep hole, then plant the rose on top. Provides all sorts of great nutrients that will help your new rose thrive. I also chop them up and dig them under existing roses every spring. Brett's fairly tolerant of the fact that spring in our house means a rotting bag of banana peels in the fridge for months at a time as I collect enough to augment twelve bushes.

This afternoon from 3-5 I go to my P-Patch orientation. I'll report back on that.

Garden destruction

Seattle's gotten cold since we left - we left at the end of summer and came back to mid fall. It was 85 in Hawaii and has been a steady 51 degrees here since we returned, with all the rain we were foolishly expecting from Tropical Ennui Kenneth. My new job requires me to spend about half of my day in other buildings, which means that I'm getting rained on a lot, tromping back and forth. Bleah.

Aside from that, it's kind of nice, this chilly turn. I like how Seattle smells in the fall, and the leaves have turned nicely this year, and it's calming somehow, these seasons. I'm not sure how you get that restful fall feeling if you live somewhere like Hawaii year round where the days vary only between gorgeous and slightly-less-gorgeous. Wouldn't that get dull? Sun AGAIN?

The garden self-destructed while I was gone. A big wind storm knocked over one of my wisterias out front, a collossus that weighs about a ton and a half, killing at least one rose bush and damaging another. It was tied to a hook, but the rope holding it up must have snapped. I've got to find a better way to support it, or just take it out.

Two of the tomato pots blew over, too. They survived, but tomato season is definitely over. I'm going to take the plants out of their pots this weekend and recycle the dirt. And another tomato season comes to a close. I picked what was left - about 15 full size tomatoes. Definitely my best year ever for tomato plants. I'll post a roundup of the varieties that did especially well in the next week or two, for those of you gardening in this climate.

Now for a winter full of faux-matoes, those shapeless, hard as a rock, red balls you can buy at the store. I don't really object to their existence -- in their own way, they're kind of pleasing, if that's all you can get. All I ask is that we not CALL them tomatoes. Clearly, they bear no relation to the real thing.

I mean, c'mon.

Garden news

Summer is slipping away (where did July go?) and I'm spending more and more time in the yard. Yesterday, I came home from work, attended to a few things, and then spent two hours happily taking care of the back garden -- staking up the white dahlias and monarda, pulling out a few things that have shriveled up in the heat, snipping out tomato suckers, counting the lemons on my Meyer Lemon tree, watering, pruning, and otherwise amusing myself. Sounds like work but the time just flies for me when I'm out in the yard.

Today I went to work but all I could think about most of the day was how much I wanted to get home and deadhead the roses I noticed on the way out to the car this morning. And how I need to buy compost. And how I should water the flowers across the street again. And... and... as I've said before, it's a sickness, this gardening obsession, and we're at the height of virus season right now.

The bee balm (left), which I dragged over in a pot from the old house, bloomed two days ago! At exactly the same time, a whole strand of it that I never knew was there bloomed in the back garden bed. Once again, I mentally bless Ingrid, the house's former owner and gardener, for somehow planting almost every plant I dearly and truly love.

Across the street, the giant bee balm with the big red flowers -- my favorite, but it's immense and wouldn't fit over at the new place -- has been blooming for a while now, probably two weeks. The house painters carefully worked around it, even though it was blocking their way.

Another thing I was surprised to find yesterday is that the wisteria in the back is reblooming (picture at right). I didn't know they did this! I've got three of these giants growing around the new house, and while I love them, I must admit that constantly having to cut them back is getting old. They grow about three feet a day, it seems like.

I was urged to cut their tendrils back weekly, but I'm doing it more like once a month now, and it involves scary things like balancing precariously on the railing over the outside basement stairs to reach the tendrils that are snaking up towards the roof.

Someday, I'll be killed by slipping off that railing with big giant clippers in my hands.

The tomato plants are doing phenomenally well - I've never so many green tomatoes or such healthy looking tomato plants. Even the full size plants are just covered in big green tomatoes, and one of them has an almost-ripe one. The silver fir cherry tomatoes out front are just starting to blush orange, every day a little more. I've been watering them religiously this year and hope that I can avoid last year's horrible cracking problem by not over- or under-watering them for the rest of the summer.

Let's hope - I can taste them already!

Ladies and gentleman...

We have our first tomato.



This year, I've got the opposite sun situation from last year - less-than-spacious front yard facing south and smaller, mostly shady back yard facing north. This has made my tomato decisions difficult. Of course I bought eight tomato plants instead of something manageable like two, because I simply can't be reasonable about such things. But then I had a dilemma. Where to put them? All on the porch and aesthetics be damned? All in the back?

I ended up putting the two that were most important to me -- the sungold cherry tomato I grow every year and just love, and one that's supposed to be especially high yield called Husky Red -- on the front porch, where they get not only full sun but a nice warm wall behind them and warm concrete underfoot.

These are, of course, the tomato plants that already have fruit on them. The picture above is the Husky Red plant. Sungold has lots of young tomatoes too.

The others are out back in the sunniest section of the yard, in special self-watering containers, propped up and helped along by red plastic mulch, which I've never tried before. The mulch is supposed to increase yield, and the lack of eight full hours of sun will decrease yield, so I'm hoping that between the two it evens out. And those six plants are actually doing fine - full and healthy and with blossoms. But no little tomatoes on them yet.

I keep thinking about transferring the rest of the pots out front, but they're really large and unsightly contraptions, and I'm trying not to totally have the garden equivalent of cars on blocks in my front yard.

Back to garden blogging for a moment

I don't know quite what's wrong with me this year, but my yard is sort of depressing me. It's only April and it's already completely overrun and out of my control. I don't remember it being like this last year! The back garden has a blackberry bush winding through the deck and the bench, and I have to get in there and machete my way through the weeds to get it out. The front yard has some infestation of some big noxious weed in the grass, and despite the ten million seed heads I pulled out this spring, there is more horsetail than ever before, everywhere. Some lacy ferny thing is taking over the rockwall no matter how fast I pull it out. It winds through my lavender and nearly choked the thyme plant from last year. I have no idea if my new decorative oreganos can survive its snarly tendrils in their first year.

Case in point: I took this picture of my new poppies hoping to end up with something nice - and because it's cool that the one plant is producing both red and white flowers. But look -- there's a big ol' horsetail directly behind it. There are a hundred of them in the tulip beds. Only the parking strips, which got the most amendments last year, are relatively sparse in their horsetail rations.

I know the answer is to dig in bags and bags of rich nutrients and next year there will be fewer of them. But I can't quite bring myself to do it right now. It's too overwhelming.

Being gone for three weeks at the start of the season may not be the greatest idea for a gardener. At least I'm back before the tomatoes come out at Swansons. They just posted a date on their web site - May 1st. I've got it circled and will be up at dawn that morning reading to beat the rush of rabid tomato growers fighting over the good heirloom varieties.

One small plus in my yard right now - the lettuce crop I put in about a month ago is ready for harvest - I made the first cuttings yesterday. Doesn't this just look healthy and wonderful? Not to mention weed free.

New house and gardening

And of course, I'm awash in thinking about gardening at the new place. The woman who lives there has lovingly gardened there for over 20 years, and the landscaping is beautiful - I have no big plans to move in and make drastic changes to anything, at least not right away.

I think you have to live with a house's current garden and its denizens for at least a year before you change anything -- see the yard and gardens through a full cycle of seasons, see what comes up that you didn't know about, take care of what's there. You have to know a place before you swoop in and change it. Even in this house, after hanging out and/or living here for going on four years, there are still things that pop which surprise me. Where'd that white cranesbill come from? Did I plant that anemone? Surprise is part of the fun of gardening.

There are, however, three things that I will have to do rather soon after we move in. I'm realizing that a lot of my ideas about what makes a house a home revolve around plants - certain plants, certain colors or scents, that need to be in our yard. For a long time, lilacs held this association for me. Now, there are three things that I hold as more important, and that form my priority list for what I'll be trying to do over at the new house this summer:

1. Install some half barrels in the back and plant tomatoes, almost immediately on taking possession. We'll be in the process of moving in the first week of May. This is prime tomato-plantin' season and I do NOT want to miss this year's crop. Tomatoes are the reason I became a gardener. So that's priority one, and will probably get done before we even officially move all of our stuff over.
   
   
2. Start an herb garden on the back deck, also in containers. Over time I'll get more a sense of what I want to introduce into various planting beds, but for now I need rosemary, sage, lemon balm, parsley, tarragon, and lots and lots of lovely mints. And maybe some borage. The first thing I did in the house we're in now was install an herb garden on the back deck -- and now I can't imagine not having one.
   
   Last year's parsley buddha:
   
   
   
   
3. Put in geraniums - again this has become a home-making ritual for me. The second thing I ever did at the house we're in now, a year before we were married, was install pots and pots of red geraniums on the front steps. This past year, I moved them to a window box at the back of the house. This particular obsession comes from my visits to rural Italy, where terra cotta pots of bright geraniums mark nearly every doorstep. Before that, I thought they were rather pedestrian little plants, but over the course of those trips they became an integral part of my vision of welcome and home and warmth.
   
   In the new house, I think I want to put two window boxes into the back yard - one beneath the kitchen window and one beneath the office that will be mine, and fill both up with red geraniums.
   
   A picture I took in Tuscany of a typical doorstep:
   

So that's it - that and learn to take care of what's already there, and commune with our new backyard tree (we have a tree! a real tree!) and get to know the plants I'm caring for now.

Sounds like a nice way to spend a summer, no?

My weekend

This was the weekend when, as I mentioned earlier, I was really hoping to spend the whole time out in the gardens, putting things to bed for the winter. Here's how things really went.

Saturday:
Rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain

*run out and chop down some tomato plants in the one hour break all day*

rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain

*run out to dinner in the one break that evening*

rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain

(etc)

Sunday:

rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain rain

*run out to buy bulb food in the pouring rain, just in case*

And then suddenly, around 1:00 on Sunday it stopped! Oh joy. Ran out and happily spent almost five hours planting tulip bulbs in the rock wall gardens out front. I lost count somewhere in the midst of it, but I think I planted about 70 bulbs today. Half of them came from this fabulous site that sells old or rare bulbs -- Old House Gardens. Well worth a look for you gardener readers out there. OHG specializes in rediscovering great old standards and saving them from extinction. The oldest thing I planted from them was this tulip that was last popularly cultivated in 1620 -- nearly four hundred years ago. How cool is that? Hope it comes up.

This is the first time, btw, that I've gotten to use the bulb planter I bought last fall -- and I must report, what a handy, ergonomic, perfectly designed little tool that is! I wish all of the tools I use in my daily life were as simple and pleasant to use as that little thing is.

I felt sort of silly dragging the hose out to water these beds when I was done, but I did it nonetheless. It's likely that it's going to rain again tonight, but it might not, and I'd hate to have all these expensive bulbs shrivel up and die because I decided to wait on the rain when I planted them. Otherwise, they're fertilized and mulched and should be ready for a nice winter's nap.

Satisfying, this. And it's the first real work I've done in the garden in over a month. Nice to be getting back to it.

Goodbye, tomatoes

Back to gardening for a second.

These utterly lovely things are the last of my tomato crop from this year.



Lemon boys, Juliets, SunGolds, Matt's Wild Cherry - all still producing. The Cherokee and the Brandywine finished a while back, but these have held on. I think, though, that this will be the last harvest I make.

The backyard is a bewildering mess of half-dead tomato plants and stray tomatoes that have flung themselves from their branches. Because I've been out of town for a couple weeks, the HUGE acorn-shaped garden spiders that moved in around early September, displacing all of their cute little cousins who'd been there all summer, have taken over, spinning their webs with wild abandon right across most of the walking paths. Prior to vacation, we'd developed a well-understood truce about where they could spin and where they would be likely to find their work undone because someone walked into it -- but apparently spidey memory is short.

Most of the other backyard plants are winding down as well. All three nicotanias, which bloomed so faithfully for almost six months, have closed up shop for the season. The basil, which did well this year, for once, is slowly dying from the bottom up. (I assume this is normal, and a function of all this rain we've had lately.) The late season lettuce, however, is gorgeous and just in the bloom of good health and vegetable-y goodness. Some of that will be going into a salad tomorrow night.

Anyway, it's mainly carnage. This weekend's task -- clean it all up. Start carting pots into the shed for the winter. Sweep up the rotting tomato-lings. Compost everything.

Rainy days

Not a lot of garden news -- rain rain rain, every day. I'm not complaining about that; in fact I love fall, madly, almost to the exclusion of all other seasons. Sweatshirt and apple weather, with its memory of childhood football games in the college towns I grew up in, the crunch of leaves underfoot, woodsmoke beginning to curl through the evening air... It's soup-making season, time to anticipate curling up on the sofa with the cats and the gardening catalogs, planning out my forays for the spring.

So here in Seattle, it's raining, most of the time. Wettest, grayest September of the last five years, it seems like. I took out the first of the tomato plants this weekend - the black cherokee produced three huge, mottled, purply tomatoes which were mouthwateringly sweet, then three rotted ones, then it rotted up itself and died. I cut it out on Sunday and was sorry to do so - tomatoes are the main reason I garden, and when the first plant comes out I must acknowledge that I'm not going to have fresh tomatoes for much longer. The cherries are still producing, though, as are the lemon boys and the medium-sized red ones whose name I've forgotten.

There was the lightest hint of a frost on the grass today when I left the house. Not real frost, of course -- too early for that -- but a precursor of frost, a pre-mortem of my garden's denuouement in four weeks or so. We've turned on the heater and taken out some of the screen inserts in windows around the house. I can occasionally see my breath in the mornings or late at night. It won't be long until it's time to mulch and lay things to rest.

I'm looking forward to it, and to planning next year's garden. Or gardens. I just signed up for a P-Patch at one of Seattle's local community gardens. There's one just down the road that appeared to have space free when I walked through it a few weeks ago, so I'm hoping I can get in. This will give me room for the big rambling stuff I can't really fit in my yard -- zucchini, pumpkins, bean towers, big huge dahlias, maybe some corn. My friend Jacki may garden it with me. It'd be nice to share the planning this winter and some of the heavy watering next summer.

Everything that's left in the yard is enjoying the rain very much - the Queen Elizabeth rose has burst into yet another round of exuberant bloom (show off!) and the Sceptre'd Isle rose, it's quieter cousin, is about to rebloom as well. The lavender hedges are blooming anew. Nearly all the sunflowers are out - the latest arrival is one dark red Chianti species. The new seed dahlias have settled in happily into the old vegetable bed, and out front, the parking strips are yet again a veritable jungle of weeds. Craziness. How do people keep up with this?

Is it just that the parking strips used to be grass forests? None of the other beds disappear under weeds after a week or so of rain - they get little infestations but nothing I can't keep up with. The parking strips nearly disappear every time it rains for more than 48 hours. I'd leave it but my parents are coming in a week or so and I was hoping things would look nice when they did. They haven't seen it since last year when it was untouched by the hand of man. But it looks unlikely that I'll get through it in time.

One final note - a year ago this very day, I was marrying the best guy in the world. The year has flown by, and I still feel lucky every day:


And because it's vaguely gardening-related, here are the beautiful flowers we had on our tables - dahlias, persimmons, hydrangeas, edible grapes, dark red roses, rosemary, and sage:

Spider friends

Anyone who knows me relatively well may be aware that in the past I've had a spider phobia verging on the abnormal. In the past, I've been so afraid of spiders that I've been known to sleep in another room after finding one in my bedroom. I've gone through my bouts of squashing them flat and carrying them outdoors on a piece of paper, but we've never before been friends.

And then this year, in conjunction with the new gardening obsession, I just got over it. Spiders are incredibly beneficial to the gardener -- as this page points out, spiders are considered to be the "most important terrestrial predators, eating tons of pest insects" every year. Like earthworms, they're absolutely essential to the environment.

They're constant inhabitants of my tomato jungle on the back deck. I've had to learn to live with them simply to pick the day's harvest of cherry tomatoes. At first I was squeamish about doing so, but now I gingerly reach through their webs, trying very hard not to destroy anything, and say hello to them as I go about my work. They spin gigantic creations over my garden gate. There's one large garden spider who lives inside my back porch window. And of course there are the ubiquitous daddy longlegs who live in the front yard - every time I weed, I come across whole families of them, scrambling away in fear, their entire concern simply to stay moist and stay alive. I say hello. I wish them well. I try hard not to hurt them.

Shortly after we reached our detente, though, I was struck by another (for me) mindblowing relevation -- spiders are, well, kind of beautiful. Weeding at our rental house, one day in July, I saw a spider who was so striking that it made me wish I could paint -- big white orb of a body, soft pink stripe up the middle, the color of a snapdragon or a rose. Web searches a month later told me this was a candy stripe spider. Tonight, I found one of these in the back yard, living on my pink nicotania plant. I've condensed the picture a bit here - click this link to see it full size. (The blue background is actually the table cloth we have on our deck table right now - but it fills in nicely as a photographer's background, doesn't it? :) )

So thus begins my more peaceful relationship with the arachnids of the world. I'm still a little scared of the big black house spider that's living in the basement at the bottom of the stairs -- when I bring the laundry up I mutter a quick hello, try not to look too closely, and hurry up the stairs. But who knows, maybe by next summer I'll be friends with her too.