greenstorm | Entries tagged with tomato

It's been awhile since I wrote. I had that truly terrible cluster of migraine symptoms at first, then work was extremely busy -- we did a last minute heli flight that lasted a full workday, then I was helping with a conference one town over, then I was recovering, then I was helping with our seedy saturday, then I did a tiny bit of pottery at the studio, now it's now. It really took everything I had to get through that. I gave up on non-masked human social stuff for that couple weeks, on doing more than minimum for food and house. Now I want to sink into the deep pool of peace that is my house and my life. I want to watch my cat sleeping and intermittently pet him for hours while my mind unspools and processes.

There's a lot to process.

It's spring and the geese are all over the yard looking for nests and there are melt-pools everywhere. I can hear gregarious honking through my dog door.

While I was at the end of the conference, but still in it, before the drive home, I was sending off a quick email to my supervisor about how my work hours supported the yearly priority plan. I used the term "DEI" and he didn't know what that meant; I sent him a copy of our organization's new DEI plan that had come out and been circulated something like last fall and he said thank you; he didn't dispute (and never does) the time I spend on this but wow.

I introduced my colleague to proper vietnamese food for the first time and as I was dressing and flipping my pho he asked how I knew how to eat it. He loved it, even the (truly phenomenal) fish sauce.

I gave away 8 mugs as door prizes and several hundred packets of my own seed at seedy saturday. They had someone else as a speaker this year talking about "proper" seed saving (how not to cross, for instance) so I spent my time at the seed tables. First I was stuffing envelopes with seed and directing people to label them as I stuffed, but we quickly ran out of packets. Then I showed people how to do the origami seed packets, the librarian used her paper cutter and a pile of recycled paper to make squares, and we folded, filled, and taped. People kept coming in with big bags of seed. Someone came in with elaborate origami seed packets with a crane folded into them. We had such an incredible richness of local seeds come in, I felt so honoured, like a conservator of a community treasure. Several thousand packets of seed went out, free, to people. My mugs, some plant starts, other folks' homemade wine went out as door prizes. The space was packed. Everyone said it was an amazing event. One of the speakers brought 75 varieties of tomato seed to give away. They say that in the coastal indigenous cultures your wealth was measured by what you give away, and I always feel that, and last Saturday I felt wealthy. All the extra seeds go to the new seed library in the library there so anyone who missed the event can still grow things. A+ use of my time but following on the end of a long week it was a lot, and by this time I was really missing talking to my people.

Dogs finally got treated for the fleas Solly picked up when she went on her walkabout. I hadn't seen any in the last month but that means very little. I've been watching videos of a professional dog groomer doing livestock guardian dogs on youtube and trying to figure out how I could wash my pups. I'll settle for getting the mats out and doing a deep brush. Avallu's been loving this; I think it's time to start treating Solly for it. Thea has realized it gets her attention so she's settled into it.

My pepper seeds are all up except for the african birds eye. It's getting on time to start tomatoes and separate the peppers, which means setting up more lights, which means clearing a shelf or two, which means doing some work on my storage container. My first round of seeds, tomatoes from Jan 1st, is doing well-- some of the micros are flowering, and the F2s exhibit the breathtaking diversity that hold me in awe and that I'd always hoped to attain.

The headache seems to be somewhat recurring, but not as constant as it was. Nausea is a near-constant struggle. These two things may (?) be correlated to air quality, as they may get worse when I turn off the CR box or have the windows closed? On the other hand it's warmed up and I can keep a couple windows cracked open so my body just feels lighter in a lot of ways.

In two weeks I'm driving to the coast for a couple days to visit Tucker and bring him (and some clay) back up, maybe disseminate some mugs.

This Wed is a bisque kiln and possibly the following weekend a glaze kiln, that doesn't leave much time for glazing.

Odds and ends, unprocessed. Spring is coming. My mind doesn't think well. Still I'm doing what I love and am happy; I only hope this life doesn't have that fall expiry date.

I was going to write about sorting tomato seeds, losing the tomato vault, the number of tomatoes I have outside the vault, which seeds I was planning to give to whom...

...but for the second time this year I was scent-bombed at work, really badly, and now I hurt and I can't think and I feel sick even though I came home as quickly as I could. Cubicle work environment really are the devil. As is the concept that a "pretty scent" is clean or nice instead of "no scent" being the actual clean.

Scent pain makes me so aggro lately. Funny how that works.

I haven't been writing about my garden much, and that's because going into the garden and looking around is as much a part of me as anything else. I don't report on my nails growing, my hair dye fading, the cracks in my heels filling with ground-in dirt. I don't report on the gaspe corn plants growing with variable heights that betray their genetic diversity, thickening their ears as the tassels brown. I don't talk about the way my seven manual crosses are growing fruit: how KARMA purple x sweet cheriette grows a cheriette-style octopus vine with what look like grape tomatoes, pointed and bigger than I expected as they betray the concept of the smallest size being dominant; how mikado black x uluru ochre makes plants that look dwarf despite dwarf supposed to be recessive and they have nice big tomatoes swelling; how everything with silvery fir tree seems more reliable; how different crosses do well in different situations, from pots to hydroponics to soil. I haven't mentioned how the potatoes were up late and have a fun array of leaves, and some look like they're going to flower. The asparagus I planted next to the apple trees, the way some apples from seed have taken off and some have died, the way the new orchard is growing well but needs pruning, all that has done unmentioned as much as the way my nose is sunburning more than usual while leaving my cheeks and arms untouched. Some things are working, some are not. It's my garden. My manual crosses especially are an extension of me and so somehow cross into that private inner space. The garden lets my soul rest, be content, and just live here where it supports me in being myself.

It's very good.

Canned a box of tomatoes today, roughly 17lbs or so after bad bits were cut out (they'd been waiting for Josh to leave so I could give them attention).

Popped them in the oven in the biggest pot for a day on 300ish, strained them through the chinois to get a (thinner than I like) sauce, added some finely processed jalapenos, hot peppers, and celery as per the minnesota mix recipe on healthy canning (omitted onion, added a touch more pepper) and cooked with a couple bay leaves in there for about an hour. Canned with citric acid as per the recipe, water bath 40 mins for 500ml jars. It it definitely on the spicy side for tomato sauce, but isn't anywhere near condiment spicy, so should be perfect. Maybe I wish I'd put a touch of garlic in instead of the onion, or dried garlic powder. I guess I can do that on the far side.

15 jars.

Makes for a lateish night though.

Need to figure out what I'm doing with the rest of the peppers, they can't all go in sauerkraut.

Open oak party is starting to tassel, though not to drop pollen. So is Early Riser, though it's a little behind.

I noticed with the gaspe that a couple weeks difference in planting time led to less time difference between maturities (I think, need to pull out all the relative dates and crunch them). I wonder if I'd got open oak and early riser into the ground three to four weeks earlier if it would have made a difference? Four weeks and there would still be the ghost of frost some nights, but probably gone by the time the seeds got above ground. With corn the growing tip stays underground in the seed for awhile anyhow, so frost is unlikely to kill the plant, but since they're so heat-activated they may not do much until it warms up.

Cascade ruby gold is dropping pollen happily but I don't see much silk. Saskatoon white looks like proper corn, full tassels, full silks, just kinda miniature (maybe 4' tall). Gaspe never quite looks like corn because it doesn't get tall enough to have that rows-of-stalks effect.

Harvested what I'm almost sure is a minsk early tomato from beside the corn and squash beds, and the spotted promiscuous tomato from beside the first promiscuous tomato.

I'm still intrigued by the super multiflora tomato volunteers. They don't seem to be setting fruit still but they sure do have huge clusters.

I need to get my fall grain and favas in soon.

My spring favas do have some pods, but it's really only some that do. Super interesting. I wonder if they needed frost to trigger pod formation and I planted them too late and missed it, if it's a water issue, or if it's something else. Hopefully the pollen from the podless ones got into circulation though.

I guess it's time to take the ducks out of the greenhouse area and clear both it and the south slope for those winter crops. I ended up with a bit of an issue since the corn and tomatoes and squash won't finish until a little later than the grain needs to be planted, so I don't think I can put things above in the big garden for winter. I could probably do a barley or fava and gaspe or saskatchewan rainbow rotation if my grain will overwinter, but I can't do full-season corn or tomatoes. And there's not time to run the pigs in for long in between, that's for sure.

The greenhouse is a cloth pop-up greenhouse, the first I ever bought, and the cover is worn out so I need to take it off for the winter. This will leave me without any greenhouses again and no money to replace the cover. I might be able to sort out a roof on it from odds and ends anyhow. I thought I'd have a big greenhouse by now, a 10-20' x 40-50' or something, in my 5 year plan.

That's life I guess. I have more garden space than expected anyhow, and keeping grain etc around my perennial plantings while they establish isn't the worst thing.

Tomatoes are almost all up from the micro plantings. My own F1s all have at least one plant, which is exciting. I'm interested to see how the cross between the dwarf sweet baby jade and the micros go, both Hardin's mini which has unusual foliage (I think it's reduced by different genes) and the aerogarden seeds which have standard mini growth.

Waiting to see which corns actually produced seed before frost, and which crossbred, is so difficult. There's nothing to be done about it though. I wanna see!

The painted mountain and magic manna (which is a selection out of painted mountain) look quite similar, as plants. They're silking and pollen dropping, for the most part.

Weirdly cascade ruby gold is starting to drop pollen but I see very few silks in it. The tallest tassel is 8' tall or something like that. Maybe it needs water?

Saskatoon white has two different flower colours but looks pretty uniform otherwise. It's had silks out for a couple days now.

Atomic orange is in full silk.

Saskatchewan rainbow has so so so many cobs on the plants, I can't wait to open them.

The first open oak party tassel is visible, it's definitely not going to make it. Likewise homestead yellow and early riser, though they are all huge plants.

There are a bunch of big green tomatoes in the promiscuous patch, I need to get in there and do some pruning. Likewise Mikado Black has a bunch of quite large tomatoes about ready to turn, and I suspect Minsk Early is about to give a bunch of smaller ones. Meanwhile the northern mixed row is variable, some plants have a bunch of nice-looking fruit and some really do not. There's a weird potato leaf plant that has tiny marble-sized fruit that don't look like they're getting any bigger. That might be a bee cross, and woth checking out the F2 on.

I should plant everything further apart for screening purposes, though planting it close together for pollination purposes was a legit idea. I'm likely to miss fruit in this jungle though.

A second melon has started, on a different plant, that looks similar in shape to the first melon. It would be hilarious if I got melons but not squash this year?

One particular squash has elongated football-shaped fruits on its female flowers, yellow with a green patch, and the three plants spread across my different plantings are super super vigorous both from seed and from transplant. I'm curious about which squash it is. Tons and tons of flowers on all the squash but not very many squashes growing. There are some, though, and lots of busy bees in the flowers.

Bees *love* arugula and I think are neglecting the rest of the garden for it.

The bouchard peas are sizing up nicely. They're such manageable little plants, I put them in with turnips and they're all the same height.

Lots of flowers on the beans but no baby beans. Um?

Some pods sizing o=up on the favas finally.

I need to plant the fall favas soon. And sort out my fall grain.

I've been cutting heads off the dango mugi barley on my deck as they hit hard dough stage, I don't want birds to get them. That is a very, very successful seed increase, I'll have something like two dozen heads from 5 seeds planted this spring at this rate.

Planted seed for dwarf, micro, and F1 tomatoes for the winter.

Transplanted a bunch of peppers into 1 gallon containers.

Bought a bunch of hydroponics stuff in prep for winter.

I'm really, really enjoying the garden right now. Even the raspberries, which I totally neglected, are being nice to me.

To shake off a bad day I went into the garden and did a bunch of manual tomato crosses.

The garden had my first ripe tomato, an orange promiscuously-pollinated one with light green speckles on it. That's kind of neat, since the plant next to it has still-unripe fruit that are pale green with darker green speckles; this one was dark green while growing and ripened into the speckles. I think they're quite fetching. The flowers on the plant weren't deeply exserted, but the anther cones were open and a little reflexed and the end of the stamen was visible.

I should probably test its neighbour for ripe-when-greenness. It's really where having this many tomato plants falls apart: I don't handle the fruit until they show colour, so I don't know when they're ripe if they're green-when-ripe.

Anyhow, the crosses from today are as follows:

Mother	Father
Lucinda	Minsk Early
Lucinda	Taiga
Mikado Black	Minsk Early
Silvery Fir Tree	Taiga
Silvery Fir Tree	Uluru Ochre
Taiga	Mikado Black
Taiga	Minsk Early
Uluru Ochre	Mikado Black
Zesty Green	Mikado Black
Zesty Green	Minsk Early
Zesty Green	Uluru Ochre
Minsk	Zesty Green

The minsk early/zesty green one is questionable, it was a weird flower with a bunch of catfacing and so I couldn't emasculate it properly, and then the minsk early has regular leaf red fruit and zesty green has potato leaf green fruit, both of which are recessive, so I won't really know in the F1 whether it crosses properly. Oh well.

All three Zestar! apples are in the ground now, along with the two Valiant, one La Crescent, and one Marquette grape. I haven't finished guilding the other two, but the first has its black velvet gooseberry and cinnamon rose and some asparagus to start. I need to flatten more cardboard to mulch a bunch of the guild plants when I put them in. The last apple is pretty cozy with some raspberries and a comfrey plant already. Maybe I'll give it a sentry rose?

I just noticed many of my guilding plants have thorns - gooseberry, rose, raspberry.

This morning I went up and collected pollen from the first atomic orange and sakskatoon white that were pollinating, and put it on some of the gaspe corn that was tasselling over in the Early Riser underplanted bed -- early riser is nowhere near tasselling or silking so the gaspe that were interspersed there needed some additional pollen. I also moved around the morden, saksatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, and gaspe pollen in the main garden.

The gaspe looks fabulous.

Tomatoes are blooming very heavily, especially some of the minsk early and taiga and the peruvianum. Lots of little green tomatoes in the promiscuous bed and in the minsk early and zesty green plants especially, though the northern mixed bed also has many. The taiga on my deck is the one I want to save seed from, it's super floriferous to the point that it looks like a multiflora a little. I want to snip a cutting from it for hydroponic crosses for sure.

Lucinda is a much slower-to-bloom plant than silvery fir tree, and it seems to be less prolific.

Mikado black has beefsteakier blooms than I remember. Corrie in town has some of my minsk black seeds and she's saying one plant in particular has super beefsteaky flowers compared to the others, I'm interested to see how the fruit present. They are both potato leaf so I don't think it would likely be a cross?

Lots of bumblebees on the tomatoes in the morning.

Some of the first female fruits on the squash shrivelled up, they those plants better get moving if they want to produce before fall. They're sure vining a lot, though, and the melons are flowering like mad so I'm interested to see if either of them make it.

Of the corns, I'll definitely grow gaspe, Saskatchewan rainbow, Saskatoon white, atomic orange, magic manna, and painted mountain again. Probably also cascade ruby gold, though it's just starting to think about tasselling and may not make it. I think open oak party, oaxacan green, montana morado, and maybe early riser aren't going to be fast enough though early riser is going super fast right now.

Of the tomatoes, I'm really enjoing the mixed northern patch. The promiscuous patch is kind of uniform seeming right now, but I absolutely cannot guess at what's going on with the mixed northern one. Note to self: next year only do 6 max each of the standard minsk early, moravsky div, and silvery fir tree and 2 each of named varieties. I want at least 150 or so unknown plants to play with. The dwarves: saucy mary, bundaberg rumball, and uluru ochre are opening buds soon but not quite yet, I'm really hoping they ripen in time. Meanwhile a ton of very, very floriferous volunteer tomatoes are filling the saskatchewan rainbow and assiniboine flint holes left by the crows with a sea of yellow. I think there's also a patch in one of the bean beds that's very friendly looking.

Next year I am definitely planting out some gold nugget and sundream and red kuri squashes to do deliberate pollinations with. I am just not certain that anything that's out there now will actually ripen. If it does there are sure lots of fathers to choose from though.

The bouchard peas have set a nice crop of pods, turnips are sizing up nicely, I remain in love with brassica carinata though it's becoming more of a sauteeing green, and my scattered gai lan is growing nice thick juicy stalks.

I wish I could spend all my time out there. Maybe next year.

Crosses done today:

In the garden:

Taiga, exserted unemasculated x minsk early (offspring should be RL, might have bee-crosses)
Zesty green (karma miracle?) exserted unemasculated x silvery fir tree

On the deck:

KARMA purple exserted unemasculated x silvery fir tree
Carbon exserted unemasculated x sweet cheriette (offspring will have red fruit)
Zesty green (probably karma miracle) exserted unemasculated x silvery fir
Zesty green (probably karma miracle) exserted unemasculated x sweet cheriette (offspring will be RL)
Emasculated uralskiy ranniy x minsk early (then realized I'd used the wrong pollen donor and stuck some silvery fir tree pollen in there because why not?)

Also: Karen olivier's breeding, but even just "most" of the even slightly more complex flowers, are very open right now for the first couple fruits. In the mixed patch a lot of the plants have their first few flowers pretty open and then some seem to close up for subsequent flowers. My mixed patch is planted from the earliest fruits from last year's plants, if I recall correctly.

I've finally used the eggplant emoji in natural online language.

Paired with a bee.

To describe certain behaviours I suspect a plant got up to last year.

This was a tomato that didn't ripen much in the way of fruit but has characteristics showing up in a lot of my saved seed, and had some pretty available pollen.

I do not suspect my conversational partner will fully understand but that's ok.

Last night I took most of the floating row cover off the garden. I left it on the new gaspe, on the montana morado/gaspe, on one patch of early riser/gaspe, and on the oaxacan green/gaspe beds: they still had young gaspe in them and I wanted them to be safe.

On the other hand, I took it off of my bouchard peas (interplanted with a brassica I'd forgotten about... maybe turnip? I don't think radish?) and they're looking nice in there, short (my other soup peas are a couple feet tall, these are a couple inches, but they're a dwarf variety so they never get that tall in the end). The turnips or whatever they are have some pest damage but the peas themselves are pristine.

I uncovered the painted mountain and it is gorgeous. There are two beds (actually three, but I didn't give my deep attention to the third) and they were both crow-picked and interplanted. They're on a south slope but they get some midafternoon shade for a bit and they are big and fast and robust. The seeds I added have grown in quickly. The surviving original plants are beautiful, and especially the seed from glorious organics produced very robust stalks.

Magic manna had poor germination, perhaps as expected, but some of the plants are tillering nicely.

I also planted a bunch of seed last night. I tossed some mixed brassica seed in with open oak party corn. I put in rows of a lettuce mix: lettuce, some mixed chicories, a little arugula, and a couple diakon seeds. I put in amarant cabbage seed which will hopefully head up over frost, it's supposed to be aphid resistant. I put in napa king F1 seed, just a few, for kimchi. I also should put in some more beets and turnips, another cabbage, some more napa cabbage, the orach I was given, and maybe some fall peas?

Up on the horizon I should figure out when to plant my barley, oats, and favas. I'd also like to fall seed tomatoes, brassicas, parsley, and just see how they'll do.

The benefit of growing my own seed is that seed is no longer a scarcity. I can put a couple thousand tomato seeds in the ground in fall and still have plenty left for spring sowing indoors in the traditional way. I can plant some favas to overwinter and if the plants don't make it, well, I can replant in spring without it costing a million dollars in wasted seed. It's a relief; money is tight right now and will be in the forseeable future.

The acorns I planted are not yet up, a couple may be peeking through the soil a little. I planted them a little deeper than acorns naturally grow, normally they fall on the ground, get covered by a couple leaves, and send their roots down from there. These I actually put in the soil to keep them a little away from squirrels, so it may be a bit before they come up.

There are zestar apple trees in town - a kind I've wanted for awhile - but I'm out of money. I've been hoping they'll be marked down but I suspect they'll instead go into the garbage. That makes me sad.

Still not within my budget but a little less time-sensitive, I've been looking at fruit seeds: sea buckthorn, buffalo berry, crossed sour cherries, mongolian cherry, maybe some interestingly-bred saskatoon, linden, and ash (I know, not fruit, but useful). Those can be fall planted with my apple seeds and they should pop up in spring.

Pulled the seeds from my winter crosses. The fruits have been ripe awhile, just sitting on the plants:

Hardin's mini x sweet baby jade
Sweet baby jade x mix of hardin's mini and the micromini from the aerogarden
micromini from aerogarden x sweet baby jade

They're fermenting.

I notice the seeds from sweet baby jade have a little tab at the narrow end; I thought it was them germinating already but it's not, those fruits (and maybe sweet baby jade generally?) contain just a slightly unusual shaped seed.

And it rained hard, thunder and lightning and power flickering and so so so much water that my little pond refilled and is trickling a stream through the spring streambed. Flats of plants filled up with water. The ducks are playing everywhere. Over an inch of water came down, I think.

I was having dinner with a coworker and his wife, which was a good time. I brought sausages and he cooked them in an amazing little brazier thing made by lodge cast-iron; I really want one of those now. Everything tastes better cooked over a fire and in good company.

This morning I went out into the garden before work to see how it felt about the rain. Mostly it felt happy; the favas have their first flower, the corn is settled in and I suspect prepping to shoot up several inches, the tomatoes are rooted in and happily greening and ramifying, the squash is throwing up its 4th and sometimes 5th leaves (it was planted with 1-2 true leaves last week), the beans are something between unfurling and popping up out of the ground, there are heart-shaped brassica seedleaves everywhere. It's good.

The tomatoes are going to be very difficult to navigate by August. I planted them in fairly tight (2' centers in a grid) blocks for better cross-pollination, and I'm leaving the weeds come right up to the edge of the block. I want pollinators, especially little pollinators, to feel comfortable. I planted pretty late so the plants won't get huge, but it's still going to be quite a carpet of plants and need careful stepping and a little judicious pruning. Note I don't stake anything.

Open oak party dent corn is just leaping upwards. It's a 10' tall corn, I didn't notice that when I ordered the seed, so it's very different from the majority of my small, northern-adapted flints. Very interested to see what it does.

I have not yet stepped out onto my deck to see how my potted tomatoes are doing.

Somewhere today I need to make some time to excavate my kitchen; I'm hosting cookie-baking tomorrow apparently.

It's nice to have some social stuff manifest. I'm trying to hold space for myself and not bite off too much humaning at once and so far that doesn't feel onerous.

Yesterday I interplanted the soaked gaspe corn into New York Red, Oaxacan, and Early Riser corns. I also gave it a little additional bed of its own. I should put the last couple kernels in with the atomic orange, I'll need to be strategic in how I protect those. The other beds were still under row cover.

I also planted out another row of tomatoes, the dwarf short-season ones from Victory seeds: uluru ochre, bandaberg rumball, dwarf saucy mary. I put some of my breeders in there too: carbon, KARMA purple, lime green salad, lucinda (I have lucinda in four seperate places and I'm so excited about it), ron's carbon copy, a couple others I can't remember offhand.

My deck is sagging, so my previous plan to put all my breeder tomatoes out there got curtailed a little bit; I don't want the weight of all the pots on there. I settled for putting out one of each, and I'll put some peppers out there but most of the peppers will end up in the greenhouse lean-to/birdshed/woodshed thing. That left the remainder of my breeding tomatoes to also go out into the garden, which incidentally has room since it has less corn than expected.

I also put in a bunch of the soaked and rooting painted mountain corn into the painted mountain blocks that had been picked apart by birds some before they were covered. I'm going to have a bunch of pretty narrow beds, since my row cover is only something like 5 or 6' wide, but that's ok.

I have a bunch of painted mountain sprouting corn seed left over. I'll need to find a place to tuck it where it won't get eaten, I guess I should use it as a test under those willow branches. I have a bunch of those branches and it would be good to know whether they work; it's just sad to reseed the completely picked-clean beds knowing they may be picked clean yet again. That or I could try it down by the house on the south slope of the garden, where I put my wheat trial last year. It has some shade there but why not?

My bouchard peas, which I increased last year, got mostly covered and seem to be doing pretty well. I'm excited about that; they're a really nice low-growing small soup-pea that seems like it should intercrop with corn or barley/wheat really well.

Meanwhile I made chocolate chip cookies with rye flour yesterday and they were good; it almost makes me want to challenge my worries about ergot. Even my triticale got ergot last year but it was 1) irrigated and 2) in a little shade. Maybe if I tried overwintering the rye and dryfarming it...?

We had that couple days of big heat and now we have some rain forecast and then more heat on the weekend; I'd be pretty happy to get alternating heat and rain all summer. My garden would love it and the wildfires might keep quiet. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile I've got my old roses doing well in pots. I should get them into the ground within the next month so they can establish well to overwinter. First I need to cut down a whole bunch of aspen suckers, though. Every task leads back to several more tasks. There's an enormous maybe 5" aspen root going into my old garden just under the soil that was too big for me to easily cut through without digging around it. I suspect it thickened up fast while stealing irrigation water the last couple years. I expect to find many more as I go through that spot along the fence. I maybe should avoid putting the roses there where they'll compete? But the haskaps are already in that general area, and I would like to make it into a nice perennial garden.

The roses in question are R. cinnamomea (double), R. gallica officinalis/apothecary rose (pre-1300), Fantin Latour (1938), belle amour (pre-1940), Chloris (pre-1815), maiden's blush (~1400), Mme Plantier (1835), and Henri Martin (1863). I could interplant them with oaks on the north side of the fields, I suppose. Roses will do well there and I'm working on building a hedgerow-style mixed planting as of this year. They're further from the house than I'd prefer for regular enjoyment though.

So.

I grew some micro-mini tomatoes this year. I planted Moment and Fat Frog. I took a cutting from each and put it in the aerogarden. Tomatoes from moment (aerogarden), moment (pot on the lighted windowsill) and fat frog (pot on the lighted windowsill) ripened all at once, so of course I did a taste test (fat frog in the aerogarden is well behind, I think it didn't pollinate its first cluster).

I scraped out the seeds, put them to ferment, and then did a taste test. Now, every time you buy micro tomatoes they say "don't overwater them, they won't taste good" so I was expecting the hydroponic ones to taste watery and the potted ones to taste good.

In fact, the opposite was true. The aerogarden ones were sweet (very little acid though) and the windowsill moments were bland. The fat frog had one good one, two ok ones, and one really bland one.

So that's maybe good news for growing tomatoes inside in hydroponics, but also just really interesting. I wonder if shifting the kinds of nutrients I used in the hydroponics owuld make a difference? I definitely grew the windowsill ones a little dry.

On the other hand, the windowsill ones were also cooler, and got longer but less-intense light.

Anyhow, the seeds are fermenting and that was neat.

I also have a Sweet Baby Jade that I pollinated with Hardin's Mini, generic aerogarden "heirloom" micro, fat frog, and moment pollen. It has two tomatoes growing from the crosses, I'm very excited. Plus, I have a generic aerogarden "heirloom" micro I pollinated with sweet baby jade that has a fruit growing on it. Eeeeeeee!

Still waiting on my matchbox x black hungarian F1 to germinate, and my black hungarian x matchbox fruit to ripen.

Alright, so I'm going to have 6000-7000 square feet of garden at Cor Viriditas this summer. The bed is roughly triangular. It's going to take an extended three-sisters planting (corn, squash, beans) with plants I've known to grow well under widely-spaced corn (tomatoes, tomatillos) shade-tolerating greens (lettuce, chard, mache, magenta spreen, shungiku, brassicas, chicories) and some pollinator attractors (calendula, borage, fennel, cilantro). I'm saving back seed from most of this, so if it's a complete failure I can try again next year.

Let's sort out how much seed I need. Generally I'll plant 1-2 seeds per plan desired; because it's a chaos garden I expect germination gaps to be filled in by whatever is close by,

I've collected some short season corns and some PNW corns for this mix: gaspe is my favourite, saskatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, oaxacan green dent, early riser, new york red, carol deppe's magic manna and cascade ruby gold, lavender parching, painted mountain from six or eight different places, a couple bits from seed trades. My plan is to make three groups: dent, flint, and flour and plant them at each corner of the triangular bed, with sunflowers in-between. There will absolutely be cross-pollination between types but perhaps a little minimized. Within each group the corn plants will be spaced fairly widely to allow undergrowth.

What this means is roughly 1500 square feet each of flour, dent, and flint corn for a total of 4500 square feet of corn. Call it 3 square feet per plant and I'm looking at 500-1000 seeds of each type. The rest of my corn will go in the freezer.

Squash will be almost all maxima, with a corner of pepo out of curiosity (I'm playing with hull-less pumpkins for the animals and trying out a few bush delicatas). Again they're short season, including the buttercup and red kuri that actually ripened last year (hopefully with some cross-pollination), potimarron, north georgia candy roaster (this makes fabulous pickles from the unripe fruits), sundream (super cool resistance/short season), nanticoke, lofthouse mix, lower salmon river, blue hubbard (I love large squashes I can keep in the cool room and chop chunks off as I need them, I'd like to steer in the direction of large), gold nugget (I think the shortest season squash? grows well among corn), a few more kabocha types. They'll be primarily planted into the corn patches, seeds mixed as evenly as possible. Give each squash plant 50 square feet over the 4500 square feet of corn garden and that's 90-180 squash seeds for the garden; the rest go in the freezer.

My landmate is going to start some tomatillos, promiscuous tomatoes, and pepper grexes I've sent her. We should be able to pop those starts in when we seed the bed. I'll have 6 shelves x 3 flats each x 50 cells = 900 plant capacity for starts. 200 will go to peppers, 50 to tomatillos (I have a sweet ground-cherry-tasting one I saved seed for last year), and much of the rest to tomatoes (I sent on my "promiscuous A" good-tasting mix, my orange/red bicolour promiscuous, I think another promiscuous one, and then a bunch of largely self-supporting favourites and open-flower-architecture named cultivars: Brad, Silvery Fir Tree, KARMA purple and KARMA MF, Minsk Early, Uralskiy Ranniy, Mikado Black, Maya & Sion, Grocery store green, I think KARMA miracle and a couple others?). So call it 400 tomato plants? They'll be in amongst the corn, and at the edges of the corn. They'll be smallish when they go in but since everything else is being direct seeded that's likely ok, they'll grow enough that some will not be overtaken and it's those vigorous ones I want to save seed from.

Beans are primarily dry bush, they'll be mixed in the center with the sunflowers, peppers will be to the south side of the sunflowers. There's roughly 6000 - 4500 = 1500 square feet of this moat. Call it 800 square feet of sunflowers at 4 square feet each, that's 400 sunflower seeds if planted 2 in each hole (I don't fully trust some of my older seed, though I suppose I could start these indoors too and just put out 200 plants). Beans are 1/square foot, 200 square feet. I'll put a dozen or two melon plants on the south side of the sunflowers in a patch with the peppers. I'll have 200 pepper plants in total, roughly (100 hot grex, 100 sweet grex) that don't really get their own space but instead go in amongst the center.

Aforementioned leafy greens and some roots (beet and turnip grexes, fall radishes, salsify) will be scattered throughout for imediate weed suppression, creating a seed bed, and immediate harvest throughout the spring/early summer.

This is the most hands-off gardening I've ever done and I think it'll be educational as to the new property. It's been awhile since I worked with light as a limiting factor. I expect plenty of things to be shaded out; the seed from what remains will be good for this kind of mixed underplanting. In year 2 I'll move this mix to rotational pig fields, using the saved seed, to help supplement my hog feed through fall and winter.

Evolutionary breeding, which includes landrace breeding, is another thing I'm into in a big way this year. In the beginning it requires a fair bit of space and curation for little return: I really try (and enjoy) to get a breadth of genetics that somewhat lines up with each aspect of what I want, and then all of that goes into a space at a density where it's likely to interbreed. Most of those plants will fail to produce a crop, or to produce seed. It's therefore taken a lot of land and research to get not a great crop. Of course some work is also removed: I did only the most casual weeding last year on my tomatoes, squash, and corn for example (and actually the squash in the weeds were the ones that set seed).

In subsequent years only the plants that can tolerate the climate and treatment set fruit and pass on their genes. This philosophy of gardening means that instead of committing to starting early transplants, amending soil just so, creating and maintaining a greenhouse and maybe little wall'o'water or hoop houses, trellising or staking or caging or Florida weaving (I still love Florida weaves) I just... don't. And the plants eventually learn to do ok.

I can still absolutely do the kinds of work I want: if I liked watering every evening I could keep doing that, it would be fine. But tasks I don't like - I am not a weed-free gardener, for example, and I find staking the number of tomatoes I like growing to just not ever get done - can go away. That work can vanish and as long as there's still a wide enough set of genes in the populations for selection to function and I'm being thoughtful about what selection pressures are occurring, gardening gets easier every year.

So. Controlled cross breeding.

If two plants breed true (the offspring are similar to the parents several generations in a row) and I cross them, the first generation seeds of that cross (F1) should all be pretty much the same. So the first year after a cross there's not too much to grow out-- a couple plants per cross.

The second generation (F2), assuming there are multiple traits that are different between the two parents, almost every seed produced will probably be a different plant. So if I grow out three plants from the second generation seed I'll get three different plants; if I grow out fifty or a hundred I'll get many of those being different. So it makes sense to grow out many of these second generation seeds to find the best out of the offspring, which might be one or many different ones.

Then of those best offspring the process of growing many plants and choosing the best should be repeated in the third (F3) generation and so on, until the plants are mostly the same as their parents in F7 or so.

So I'm planning to make a bunch of crosses this year, and growing the offspring out the first year isn't such a big deal. But after that, F2 generation and so on, ideally many plants would be grown out in each subsequent year. Alternatively I could grow out the F2 in multiple years, say 10 plants per year, but it's harder to compare them to each other across years and then that really slows down the time until the end of the process.

So anyhow I'm planning on doing a bunch of crosses this year. Next year will be fine! And honestly the F1 plants will probably be relatively boring, many of the fun traits are recessive and won't come out until F2.

But 2024 will involve some interesting choices.

I'm not sad about having that to look forward to.

We are having another cold spike, -23C last night is supposed to be the worst of it. We'll see.

Meantime inside so many of the seeds I planted are coming up. First Moment then Fat Frog tomato are showing flower clusters; they were planted on Dec 25 so this is 59 days, I expect the flowers will be open by day 65. That seems very standard. There seems to be a little community around breeding micro tomatoes on the totally tomatoes forum; I don't have time to think about that too much right now but I'll likely revisit next winter.

Meantime artichokes are putted up, a bunch of my saved peppers and tomatoes - doe hill, pepperoncini, favourite panamorous toms, the zesty green one, sweet cheriette, some of the perennial onions, the dahlias, etc. It's almost time to set up my real production seed starting for peppers around March 1st, then it will be tomatoes April 1st. Hopefully my pepper seeds arrive by that time!

The matchbox peppers on the windowsill are covered in baby peppers and flowers and flower buds. I can't believe how many peppers those things want to produce! I did fertilize them, maybe that was what did it. There are so many flowers I've lost which ones I crossed with hungarian black, so I'm going to have to do that cross again. I marked the cross on the hungarian plant ok, but the matchbox plants are so delicate I'm uncertain how to mark them, maybe by tying a thread around?

I still have not threshed all the barley and wheat. I think I need rubber gloves to do it.

Mom is up for a couple days and yesterday was a holiday, so we rearranged (arranged?) my basement so I can put the production transplants down there. I added two more big shelves and for the first time I feel like I'm starting to have a handle on this space. It basically means lining every wall with shelves, and with whatever size of shelf will fit (short shelves under curved walls, tall shelves against straight walls) but it is finally beginning to be functional.

Next step is a castor type device for my pottery wheel so it can scoot away and out, and then line the back of the downstairs main room closet with wine rack probably.

Planted on the weekend:
Asparagus, 2 kinds
Gooseberry, Captivator seeds (set outside to stratify)
American Elderberry mix (set outside to stratify)
Many peppers: 2nd round praetermissum, saved doe hill & greek pepperoncini, early jalapeno, kalugaritsa, piment de bresse, sarit gat, shishito, chimayo, targu mures, aji delight, haskorea
A tiny first round of AJ White teff
A couple of tomatoes: crunchy tropical bicolour promiscuous, KARMA miracle saved

Today I'll add:
Amaryllia & cossack pineapple ground cherry/tomatillo
An indoor cucumber for fun
Maybe sorrel (3 varieties)
Sage
Thyme
Look into the weird nightshades (jaltomato, tzimbalo)
Onions (evergreen white, red beard bunching, ed's red shallot, shallot multiplier, Andy's green potato onion mix
Sweet cheriette, minsk early, taiga, KARMA purple multi, carbon, silvery fir tree, minsk early, and grocery store green for breeding?
Skirret
Hardy prickly pear, colorado and vineland
Daylily seeds

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greenstorm

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Greenstorm's Journal

watching the cycle: leaves to mulch to soil to leaves

Entries tagged with tomato

Inversely productive

(no subject)

As invisible as bones

More for later

Aw

What's Going On?

Paying it forward to myself

Garden progress

Tomato Crosses

I've joined the modern age

Gift Unwrapped

Forwarding

Last night it rained

Easily distracted by plants

Tomato Expectations

The Triangle

Removing Work

Making work

I like plants

Into the soil