Garden Update 08-18-2014 - Heirloom Tomatoes

Interests Gardening
#1

Took these yesterday… getting ready to take these tomatoes to the stand this morning. The big one in back has to be a 2+lb tomato, I’ll weigh it at the stand. The bucket I have them in has to weigh about 20lbs.

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before I picked them…

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Onions… I pulled all of my onions last week and have been letting them dry out in the sun, which has been tough up until yesterday due to all the rain. Mostly small onions but they’re good and we haven’t bought onions in months now. I’ve seen where if you want big onions you should buy the onion plants which is what I’ll be doing next year.

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Sweet peppers

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The back tomato patch… getting overgrown!

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These cherry tomato plants are totally loaded down, I have 4 big bushes of this type, I pick a bunch every 3-4 days… they’ve blown over after outgrowing the stakes, if I stretched them out they’d be 8 feet tall.

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2 Likes
#2

Nice. Sometimes for lunch I eat just an heirloom – sliced, with olive oil drizzled on it, a little black pepper. That and a good piece of bread. Sardines or tinned mackerel if you want to make it a bigger meal.

#3

I eat them like that sometimes but no olive oil and a little mozzarella, def. no sardines!

I’ve been blanching, skinning and freezing bags of them about 10lbs at a time. I have a table full besides those that I’m selling.

#4

Yeah, mozzarella and some fresh basil. But try just a little olive oil and black pepper.

What have you got against sardines? BigDuke has a pile of tins under his bed for endtimes.

#5

I’ve got a lot of fresh basil too, I eat it with most things tomato. I like making some quick little pizzas too, just take a flour tortilla and put a little cheese on the bottom to help hold the tomato. Slice the tomato up for the sauce, add some fresh basil, fresh oregano, a little salt and pepper on the tomato, some onions and peppers and some cheese, maybe a little pepperoni or sausage for flavor, throw it in the oven.

#6

Nice. Try making your own pizza dough, it’s not hard.
Also, pizza cooked on the BBQ.

#7

I’ve done the make my own dough deal quite a bit and make my own sauce too, never tried the bbq thing though.

I do have one San Marzano tomato plant that I got in a little late which are supposed to be the choice for making pizza sauce. I picked a few off of it yesterday, it’s kind of a Roma looking tomato. I’m going to do more of those next year.

Never really perfected the dough thing but it’s always edible.

#8

I picked my crop of grapes and am now in the process of ripping out all of the vines. The guy I bought this house from was a gardening hobbyist freak who didn’t have to work for a living. He landscaped this place like it was a botanical showcase or something with exotic plants and flowers everywhere. The problem is my front and back yard now look like an Amazon jungle because I don’t have time to keep everything in check. I’ve started to get rid of a lot of foliage. I have to or I’m going to be overcome with insects and wildlife.

I don’t know what this thing is, but it has to go. It’s turning my Jacuzzi into a watering hole for Japanese beetles.

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#9

Leave the grapes and anything that produces food at least… that plant is awesome whatever it is, maybe some type of grass?

oh and lol @ some gardener hobbyist freak that didn’t have to work for a living…someone planted a bunch of flowers and shit around here that I don’t care about… rose bushes… I’d like to rip that shit out and plant vegetables there…

#10

Oh, I would love your garden!! I believe that’s a Pampa’s grass.

It’s absolutely lovely. You have no idea how much money he invested into that garden, but it’s a lot. I’d suggest a gardener. It will maintain the value of your home…

#11

Those are absolutely stunning tomatoes. mmmmm

#12

Your tomatoes look delicious.Sometimes I will eat some canned stewed tomatoes, plain or as a sauce for vegetables. Anyway, I am reading the can and I see where it has 24 grams of sugar in it(Hunts). I have been reading the labels of other canned items as well, they are all loaded with sugar. I try to eat fresh but I don’t always have the time.

This is just an idea, maybe you could sell bottled, stewed tomatoes, or tomato sauce and sich and advertize that they don’t have a lot of sugar. I bet they would sell but it would be a lot of work.

#13

My neighbor has a lot of that grass(several varieties) that she could use for privacy if she arranged them right. She cuts them down every fall and they always grow back.

#14

I’m cooking some down for some pizza sauce right now, it will be very sweet and I don’t add any sugar to it. Maybe there’s just that much sugar in the tomatoes themselves?

I picked at least that many more heirloom tomatoes yesterday and will probably have another nice haul in a few days and then they’ll probably slack off for awhile. The 5 days of rain a few weeks ago seemed to have killed the new tomato flowers and they didn’t set any fruit during that time.

#15

I was going to post these too, some heirloom lettuce I have growing, looks a lot different than common lettuce seeds I get. We ate one of them like the top one but a bit bigger on a BLT about a week ago and it was really good. I’m going to grow more of the heirloom lettuce.

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#16

You see that stuff up here some too, I’ve heard called Pampas grass and also elephant grass, that’s probably an older plant I think it takes it a few years to get that big.

#17

Billdo, you have an amazing vegetable garden. It’s absolutely luscious. You have a real gift.

#18

Yeah, I can see these things can’t really be uprooted without a major dig. I also see now that the guy I bought the house from put them next to the Jacuzzi for privacy. I don’t intend to be using the Jacuzzi naked unless it’s late at night, so to me they are just a nuisance. The guy was a privacy and security freak. He put a 10ft granite wall around the property and has some kind of thick thorny ivy covering it. He also installed motion detectors all over the property and a security/surveillance system that the ADT guy likened to something Pablo Escobar would use.

#19

Maybe he had something nefarious going on.

#20

I think he was one of those serial killers that you read about all the time, that did terrible stuff inside the house.

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