I know not everyone has the advantage I do… Granny. Every afternoon without fail (unless God’s doing the watering), she’s out there with a hose. Our garden has never looked so amazing.
Back in March she and I went to Tomatomania and I bought five “cherry tomatoes”:
Bosque Blue Bumblebee (yellow with blue shoulders),
Stripes of Yore (I think something happened with the genetics on that one, it starts out with green stripes then as it ripens it turns into large yellows),
Evil Olive (Granny shuddered; it’s got a greenish tinge but has a dull red all over. “How do yew know they’ah ripe, deah?”)
Sprinkles (pearl sized reds)
Lemon Drops (oooooh yum, everyone’s favorite, super sweet)
Freakin’ liars, these things weren’t cherry tomatoes except for the lemon drops. I’ve had everything from a one pound plus monster to “Sprinkles” (the name shoulda clued me in).
I had no idea when I planted these things about 1.5 ft apart they’d spread like COVID at a high school dance.
Then, with the heat and Granny’s daily soaking…
Holy crap, they went up the bank, against the fence (and that hill is NOT terribly stable, walking on it is an exercise in hillside collapse) and all over each other.
Ole Sprinkles is more like kudsu. It will take over your house if you blink. There’s Sprinkles in all of the plants. On the ground. Flattened. Dehydrating on the vine, because I can’t reach the freakin’ things…
We sacrificed Blue Bumbles this morning – he was looking a bit sickly but even then he produced a buncha buncha fruit as I chopped his carcass apart. Stripes of Yore heaved a sigh of relief and totally spread into the vacated space, revealing a bunch more maters.
As I had a bunch of super ripe Stripes of Yore, I decided to try making ketchup. The NYT recipe said “don’t use your heirlooms for this one”, but y’know, they’re all I had and they needed to be dealt with immediately.
My suggestion to any professional chef out there: grow tomatoes then make ketchup. Offer a flight of different variety tomato ketchups with fries. Heck, I’d pay a pretty good sum of money for that farm-to-table appetizer.
Examining Misadventures 