Dester Tomato

See the biggest tomatoes up there? Those gorgeous pink ones? Those are the variety Dester.

These are huge, pink beefsteak tomatoes. I’ve grown them in years past and never had much luck with them. But this year, wowsa! They are really stealing the show.

Here’s the blurb from Seed Savers: “Winner of SSE’s 2011 Tomato Tasting and runner-up in 2012. Donated to SSE by Missouri farmer Larry Pierce, who received his seeds from an Amish woman in Seymour, Missouri. She originally got her seeds from a doctor she worked for whose family had brought the seeds with them from Germany. Luscious pink beefsteaks weighing up to one pound. Indeterminate, 70-80 days from transplant.”

The reviews of this tomato are interesting. Folks have had good years and bad years with this one, although one woman said it’s her go-to tomato for best production every year. It seems to be disease resistant and hardy. Mine fruited once the temperatures got a little cooler and that wasn’t until early August, but it’s continued pumping out fruit even with higher temperatures since then.

Since it’s done so well this year, it’s earned a place in next year’s garden.

My posts have been shorter lately because we’ve had a Japanese exchange student staying with us. Our daughter is deeply into the Japanese language and culture, and when offered the opportunity to host a student, she jumped at it. It’s been a very interesting and fun experience. I was nervous because our home is so small (and with only one bathroom), but it’s all worked out fine. Nagisa is with us until Sunday, and then it’s back to Tokyo and her senior year of high school. We will miss her!

Adding to the time crunch is the fact that I started my semester this past Monday. I’m taking some classes that are very challenging for me (Statistics, Chemistry) and I’m quite anxious about my workload this term. However, I’m trying to approach them as I would any class, with an open mind and a willingness to learn something new. I’ve signed up for math tutoring just in case things start to kick my ass a little bit, so I’m feeling pretty secure…. for now anyway.

Stay tuned for a post regarding what I’ve noticed in the compost pile since I’ve been getting that fruit pulp every Friday. I’m waiting for some cooler weather to turn it over and really explore, but I’m suspecting that activity has increased!

Meanwhile, have any of you grown Dester tomatoes? If so, I’d love to know what kind of results you’ve been getting.

August cooking: Preserved Peppers and Pimento Cheese

With our recent heat, the peppers have started coming in. While the majority of the sweet peppers get eaten fresh, with excess going to the freezer (either just cut into strips, or roasted first), the rest need to be processed in some way (with the occasional hot pepper getting sliced into salads, etc).

I grew and made all my own paprika last year; the quality was so superior to anything I could buy in the store that I decided to do it every year. So today I am dehydrating paprika peppers for the plain variety. When I have a few more come in, I’ll smoke them, then dehydrate. I also dehydrate cayenne for my own ground spice, and make chili powder using all of the above as well as some other ingredients. I also make our own sriracha every year.

Tom is making pickled hot peppers today as well; these are then canned using the water-bath method and available through the next year for use in all kinds of things. Tom and Adam are particularly fond of any kind of pickle. I prefer the fermented kind and used a new recipe this year which I like a lot, substituting our own apple cider vinegar for the distilled kind. You can find that recipe HERE.

I also experimented making my own pimento cheese today. Last year I was reminded of this southern delicacy and decided to grow pimentos precisely for the purpose of making it. I spent a good deal of time researching different recipes; it seems that every town in the south has its own regional spin. I finally went with a recipe from Sean Brock, author of the southern cookbook Heritage. I liked it because it included pickles and brine, of which we always have quite a lot (see note above). I tweaked it a little, using homemade sriracha rather than generic hot sauce, pickled sour cucumbers rather than ramps or bread ‘n butter, eliminating both ground peppers and the sugar. I also processed it in the food processor after mixing it by hand and not liking the lumpy texture. And, well, I’d say it’s okay. I’ll eat it in sandwiches this week (I have to brown bag it M-Th) or as a dip for veg, but I want to make it differently next time. I want it thicker, not so runny (too much brine). It is also a little too salty (depends on your pickles, I guess). I definitely want the ratio of peppers to cheese to be higher - it should be mostly pepper, in my opinion.

This recipe included both sharp cheddar and cream cheese. I’m wondering if I used cultured cream cheese and no cheddar cheese, if I’d like it better. Maybe I’d just prefer a sort of roasted pepper cream cheese thing. But then, is that even pimento cheese?

So I’d like to ask you guys, how do you make it? I know we have some southerners on here (Linda, I’m looking at you!). I grew up in MD, ostensibly the south, and yet I never had this as a youth.

Here’s an interesting article about why pimento cheese is considered a southern dish, even though it turns out that it was born in New York City. I like the suggestion at the end to bake it with sausage (and maybe bread crumbs) as a sort of casserole. What do you think?

Lucid Gem Tomatoes

Like many of the Wild Boar Farms tomatoes, these start out green with purple shoulders, ripening to a beautiful orange color on the bottom and a dark red/purple color on the top. I’ve noticed that many of the tomatoes from this breeder ripen later than others, which I think has something to do with the dark shoulders. It takes a LONG time to get results on these plants, but when you do - whoa mama. They are really, really beautiful. Check out the inside of this one.

Looks like a stained glass window, doesn’t it?

I’m slicing these up for a Caprese salad tonight, and they sure look amazing on the plate. I mean, they taste great too; all of the tomatoes from this breeder have a nice sweet/tart balance, and they are all meaty. And that’s what’s really important, right? But the beauty of them really blows me away. It’s like an extra little gift.

I don’t know Brad Gates, this breeder, personally, but I have to imagine that he is just delighting himself at this point. Like, how much more gorgeous can tomatoes get? And his delight is rubbing off on me.

The only downside is that, since they are hybrid varieties, you can’t save seed. I mean, you could I guess, but there’s no telling what they’ll be like - they won’t necessarily come true. But I still think it’s worth it to buy one or two varieties each year, save the leftover seed carefully, and use the rest up the next two years. Just for the delight and beauty!

Letting Go

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about letting go. We’ve had a lot of milestones here in the past few months which are putting this issue front and center for me. Our daughter, 16 and a junior in high school this year, got her drivers’ license earlier this month. Our son, 17 and a senior in high school this year, got his first job, which is in a little French bakery near here. We’re all looking at colleges, SAT tests are being scheduled, school shirts labeled SENIOR have been distributed. This morning, after I took what will possibly be the last ‘first day of school’ photo of the kids together, they hopped in their car and took off. No more school dropoffs and pickups for me. It feels like one more way I’m letting go.

Maybe parenting is just one long series of letting go. The first time you leave them with a sitter. The first time you take them to preschool. The first time they go to sleep-away camp. The first time you leave them at home alone for an hour. Etc etc etc, all culminating in them leaving for college. I used to scoff at people who worried about this stage, and now I’m in the thick of it. Trust me when I say I am no longer scoffing. It is a true adjustment and the feelings about it start long before the actual event. I mean, I’ve got a year before I have to deal with any big-time letting go. And actually, maybe it’s a form of protection that we start feeling the angst of it early on - hopefully that means no tears on the actual day and the adjustment will already have happened. A friend and classmate of mine, who has a son going to Boston for college this year, said to me, “I hardly saw him senior year. And it helped prepare me for this day. Well, that and therapy.”

I don’t start classes until Monday, which means I have some overly-contemplative time to fill. I did some more letting go this morning by removing 16 tomato plants that were looking very sickly, and replanting that space with edamame and more cover crops. The tomatoes were basically done producing, and since they were diseased, I thought it best to take them out and put them in this week’s green bin for pickup. I still have 16 beefsteak tomato plants, and nine very productive cherry tomato plants. So we won’t be lacking harvest potential anytime soon. I’m also making the first batch of summer salsa, as I have enough Jalapeno and Anaheim chilies to make it worthwhile. I always use the recipe from an old Ball Blue Book, and we love it.

It’s hard to think about things changing. Our Augusts are usually on the cool side, with temps in the 80’s for most of the month, and then the heat comes roaring back in September. Bu so far this year, August has been quite hot. We can’t count on ‘the usual’ any more. We have to expect changes and become resilient as gardeners and farmers. I’m reading tons of hopeful stories about farmers changing the way they farm, or changing crops entirely, or thinking differently about the idea of a ‘farm’ (one story I read was of a midwest farmer who traded acres of grain for acres of solar panels). Patterns are not patterns so much anymore. We’re going to have to learn to live with the uncertainty and let go of the ways in which we ‘used’ to do things. Maybe your plant palette will have to change, or you’ll have to move things around to account for more/less heat, more/less rain. Maybe gardening, like parenting, is just a series of letting go.

A Bat in our Garden

The picture above was taken last August at the Yolo Bypass - an event that I wrote about at the time and can be accessed HERE. I love bats and have always wished to have them in our garden. The likelihood is that they already are, but last night we had proof: For about ten minutes, around 8:30 pm, I watched a single bat fly around the North side of our garden.

First, the behavior: The bat flew quite low, about 8 feet off the ground (sometimes higher) in a roughly circular pattern over this portion of the garden, dipping lower as it flew over the compost pile in the chicken’s run, and then higher as it flew over and around the plants and trees. It kept coming back to the compost pile, and all I could figure is that there were a lot of flying insects in that particular area. It dodged and changed patterns, swiftly and surely. At one point I could hear its wings beating, but of course I could never hear its chirps as they are in a register far above our hearing ability. What an absolute delight. Tom and I just could not get over it and were so happy to see that evidence of a healthy ecosystem.

Many years ago, Tom and Adam built a bat box to erect in the garden, but we never got around to putting it up. It has been sitting upright on the ground, against the fence, behind the quince tree, ever since. It would require a large pole; bats are notoriously fussy about boxes and they have to be positioned just right, it just always seemed too difficult to make it ideal for nesting (for a list of requirements, see this page). I’m regretting that now, and will begin again to figure this puzzle out. Meanwhile, where was this single bat nesting? We do have a highway overpass about a mile away, where we’ve seen swallows nesting for years. It’s near a not-quite-dry-in-summer creek, which is ideal for bats. We are also not far from a series of cliffs and rock walls in the Mt Diablo foothills. Bats can fly many miles to find good forage.

Wherever the bat is nesting, it is likely nesting in a colony, and they all leave the area at the same time each night. Then they each go their separate ways, looking for prey. I’ll have to remember to go down to the freeway overpass and see if there is a bat ‘exodus’ in the evening! Bats are also migratory, so they might only be nesting here in the summer months.

Photographing this single bat would prove difficult. First of all, it’s heavy dusk. Second of all, its flight pattern is so fast and erratic. It seemed quite small, which makes me think it was a Mexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis), but it could have also been a big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) or any one of the genus Myotis. I just do not know enough about bats to be able to ID it on the wing, in the dark.

You can be sure that tonight at the same time, I will be outside sharp-eyed, looking for the bat to return - maybe with friends. Do you have bats in your garden? Have you successfully installed a bat house? I’d love to hear about it. Meanwhile, for more information about Northern CA bats, please visit the Northern California Bat Rescue and Education website (you can also get info on the tours at the Yolo Bypass, like we attended last August - they are usually booked ahead of time so plan ahead) and also see this interesting article in Bay Nature, written by one of my Horticulture classmates! Also, the following video from Growing a Greener World (PBS) has some fabulous information.