Whether you say "toemato" or "tomaato," New England home-grown gastronomic delights commence at Linwood Cottage tomorrow night. If you can get here, you'll get a bite of a pot-grown plum tomato.Close your eyes and lick your lips; a soft, rich bread slathered with mayonnaise floating tomato slices several layers thick, an explosion of perfectly ripe tomato taste, and juice running down your chin. Don't rinse - just bow your head and grin. Carefully. Grins leak delectations down chins and onto fresh shirts.
Pot-grown tomatoes offer such treats early when planted in full sun in a terracotta pot. The top inch or two should be 1-1-1 rotted cow manure, the middle a rich loam, and the very bottom should be gravely over the pot's hole. Just add a quart or two of water a day, and let the specially educated plant and the strong summer sun do the rest.
The vine shown here holds perhaps 30 tomatoes in all stages of ripening, from pollinated flower to plump red fruit, with no end in sight, this side of first frost.
Who gets them? Well, at the cottage, we call them the gardener's reward - note well the singular possessive. Who watered them day after day matters little, perhaps less than the supervision of the careful layering of the soils and fetching that special top dressing of manure from the local garden shop; The Gardener gets the reward, and at times she may be generous, should the yield provide for more than one. She knows incentives...
2 comments:
Fred!
What are you doing eating Roma (plum) tomatoes right out of the pot? Out here they're used for cooking. Actually, they're preferred for cooking. Eaten raw, they have relatively little taste and what there is is said to remind one of a refrigerator - a place no tomato should have to enter unless already cooked.
High among the taste hogs, we Santa Barbarians (pronounced any way you like), prefer to enjoy the old heirloom varieties, e.g., Purple Cherokee or Green Zebra or a Brandywine or, or - there are SO many. Maybe even you should try an Ugly Ripe? With looks different as imaginable, most all of the heirlooms prove very tasty.
OK, I agree on the soil prep, but grown in a pot, we prefer the Cherry varieties because of their intensity and sweetness. Suggest you grow some Sweet 100s, Sun Golds or Red Cherry types in your pot.
Now get back on that bulldozer and prepare the soil and plant a real garden. Oh, and stay away from the "supermarket red" types - they're bred to ship, not eat.
Thanks for the advice from Santa Barbara. The cherry tomatoes are in the regular garden, self-seeded from last year, but not yet ripe. We agree completely on the criticism of supermarket reds, almost worthless, unless nothing else will do.
Nothing can beat a still-warm, home-grown, red.
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