Dreaming of Gardening Despite the Snows of January.

The Best Part about Winter is Dreaming About Spring.


I have looked back at old garden posts, and they need some information about how different garden plants turned out.

In 2009, I posted on the Profusion Zinnia in the front yard, and they did not work out. They came up and grew, but the fairly shady spot with its weak soil was a disappointment. The plants never were tall enough and showy enough.

I posted on the "well-reviewed" yellow pear tomatoes too in 2009.  The plant grew vigorously, but the yellow pear tomatoes tasted like like wheat-paste. Not very good at all.

The Black Cherry tomatoes were a big success. The tomatoes were so good that I wish they would have been more productive.

Last Year's Garden Plants - 2010


Eggplant - standard variety - very product, but took up more space than expected

Leaf lettuce (Burpee Muslin Mix)/Spinach/Arugula (Burpee) - turned out well, I planted them between the tomatoes, and the shade extended the season. The rabbits never found them, or if they did they left them alone. The Arugula was great.

Zucchini (Ambassador) - Very strong and productive, and lasted all season. Large plant that needed more space.

Cucumbers - big success. I just bought them at the store, and it worked pretty well.

Peas - (Burpee Snow Wind and Burpee Mr. Big) Not a good year for these. I only harvested a few peas. the cucumbers grew through the rabbit fence that I had around them, and I never was able to take the fence down.

Catnip - God! The catnip grew and grew. Even with Jenny harvesting continuously, and the cats flopping down on the plants, they still invaded the eggplant and the peas.

Tomatoes - one of each -  Burpee Big Boy; Pinetree Seeds Black Cherry, Burpee Black Truffle, Sungold, Sweet 100;  The most disappointing part was the failure of the large tomatoes. My tomatoes typically get mold during July, but usually they keep growing faster than the mold can kill them.  The plants had a good start, and the red cherry tomatoes produced pretty well. The Black Cherry, Black Truffle and Big Boy were very disappointing. In 2011, I intend to start a second crop of tomatoes in June -- in addition to the main crop started that I put in the garden in April using Wall-o-waters.

Pineapple Tomatillo (Pinetree Seeds) - I only planted one of these, and it was just OK. I have had more productive plants in other years.  These taste great though.

Strawberries - This was year four for most of the strawberries, and I was really disappointed. I attributed the bad harvest in 2009 to over crowding, and thinned aggressively. The plants did not seem to take off in the Spring like they should have. I thinned them out again this year, and if I don't get some fruit, I am going to take these out, and put in flowers.

Petunias (White and Red Madness) - One of my favorite varieties, but increasingly hard to find. The white ones were more vigorous than the red ones, and some parts of the planting were out of balance.

Brussel sprouts - turned out pretty well, and tasted like Brussel Sprouts.  Ended up with more brussel sprouts than I wanted.

Butternut squash - good year for butternuts. Still have some.

Pimento - I like pimento. It has a thick skin, and never gets hot. The peppers are small enough that half don't go to waste.  One thing I have learned is that all my peppers are 100 times hotter than the store bought analog.

French Marigolds - I planted two trays of French Marigolds as a border around the garden, and that worked pretty well.

Basil - I only plant basil for the fragrance in the garden. I seldom use it in the kitchen - perhaps once a season. I don't really like pesto, but it does smell nice outside.



2011 Garden Plants

Eggplant (Lavender Touch) -

Arugula and leaf lettuce -

Cucumber (Muncher) -

Zucchini (Eight Ball, Pinetree Seeds)-

Tomatoes - eight plants - five started in April; three in June - (Sun Gold, Sun Sugar, Black Krim, Early Girl (Improved) and Celebrity) Early Girl and Celebrity are returning to the line-up after several years on the bench. Early Girl is the most popular tomato in the US, so there must be something good about it. I am also after a medium sized tomato. Celebrity has a lot of disease resistance. I have never been too impressed with it in the past, but the Celebrity tomatos look nice and taste pretty good. Black Krim may be a mistake -- it is a Black Russian Beefsteak Heirloom, so there is a 90% chance that next year's posting will talk about how I got only 1 or 2 decent tomatoes from this plant, but I can hope it will be a treasure of flavorful exotic fruit. I hope to plant the Sun Gold and Sun Sugar today.

Pimento  - Got these on eBay from Dragonfly183.

ASPARAGUS - The story is that in every house I have lived in, I always get transferred before the asparagus is large enough to eat. I have been hesitating planting it since I am not ready to move. I am ordering asparagus roots this year. I am going to take space devoted to strawberries, and convert it to asparagus.

Zinnea (Queen Sophia) -

Petunia (Prime Time) -  I gave up on looking for more of my favorite, the Madness Petunia. I don't want to try Waves; it seems everyone is planting them.

The backyard is waiting for Spring too.

Kumato Brand Tomatoes from Syngenta/Mastronardi Produce

Kumato tomatoes have shown up in America. They are a black tomato; the box says brown tomato. Presumably the dark color is due to more flavorful and nutritious tannins and terpenes. Obviously they are not "black," seed developers and seed catalog writers exaggerate.

Many people like the flavor of these tomatoes, and I do too. They have an earthier flavor than most store-bought tomatoes. My DW likes the texture, especially the thin skin. Notice they have very few seeds. In my opinion the Kumato's texture is a bit mushy and pasty -- like a Roma tomato. I like my home-grown Black Cherry tomatoes better. I started them from seeds I bought from Pinetree Seeds. See the picture at the bottom.

In the US and Canada, Kumato tomatoes are distributed by Mastronardi Produce, which has the Sunset line of tomatoes. Mastronadri is growing these in huge greenhouses in Ontario. It is unclear if distribution is regional or national. A California company, Dulcinea, is also selling a black tomato that it calls "Rosso Bruno," and this may be the same tomato.

The Kumato seed is from the Swiss company Syngenta, a large, agricultural products business formed from the merger of AstraZeneca and Novatis in 2000. The Kumato fruit was available in the UK since 2004. PracticallyEdible.com says that it was developed by Damien Flores in Spain under contract to Syngenta, and they were looking for a seed that grew in salty soil. Blogger TomatoAddict suggests that it might not be a hybrid as Syngenta claims, and that seed-saving might work.

There is a story that the genetic ancestor of these tomatoes came from the Galapagos Islands, and indeed there are/were wild, dark orange tomatoes there. There have also been so-called black tomatoes in Ukraine for generations.

Syngentia is only releasing the seed to commerical growers as happened with the "Santa" "Grape Tomato" previously.

At right is my home-grown Black Cherry Tomato. I think they taste much better -- sweeter and tomato-ier, than the Kumato. As mentioned, my DW likes the texture of the Kumato, better than my cherry tomatoes though.

Opossum Eats(!) Greg's Late Spring Tomatoes :-(

An opossum that lives in the woods in the back. 

This was going to be a posting celebrating the tomato harvest on May 28th, which I am still proud of, but the opossum came by and ATE my tomatoes. Oh No!

Tomato skins that remain from the opossum.

Here is the residue from the missing tomatoes.








Happily there were a few tomatoes left. These were Sunsugar Cherry Tomatoes. They are orange colored, and usually sweet. These tomatoes -- like all very early ones -- are not sweet like they will be in late July.

Cherry tomatoes from another plant. 

The secret to early tomatoes is to get them to set fruit when they are still inside under the lights. If you move them out too early then there won't be flowers that get fertilized.  The fruit that sets outside won't be ready until July.

The warm weather this year really helped. I started these tomatoes in February, and used lots of Miracle Gro.  I used the Wall-O-Waters; see this post for details.

2010 Tomatoes

Its seed catalog season, and I've got my favorites. It is time to order seed, because I want to have plants with flowers before I put them in the ground.

At right is the Tye-Dye from Burpee. It is on the winter catalog cover. It is supposed to taste good, but its claim to fame is the mixed orange and red color. I am skeptical about vegetable that only look good.

Orange color or even albino tomatoes come from breeding varieties that don't have a lot of lycopene, the carotenoid that gives tomatoes their bright red color. (I put the structure at the bottom of the page for the chemistry geeks.) Lycopene is a quencher of singlet oxygen, and many anti-aging and anti-cancer benefits have been suggested, though not proven to my satisfaction. Nonetheless, I'd rather have tomato with more color than less color.

If you want more lycopene, then you should try a black tomato, which are not black because gardening catalog writers have notoriously poor color vision. (previous post.)

At right are Black Cherry Tomatoes from Pinetree Seeds. They are browner in real life than in my picture, which I took last summer. They taste great, but the skins are a little thick. Some catalogs claim these are disease resistant. I had pretty good luck with them last year. They grow fast enough to stay ahead of the mold.

Some people claim the open pollenated, so-called heirloom variety Pruden's Purple is a black tomato, but it is not a very good variety to me. The plants are all-over the place. The tomatoes crack and the yield is fairly low.

A promising variety is Black Truffle from Burpee, which is a hybrid, but Burpee does not claim any disease resistance. Supposed to be a version of Black Pear. It is a Burpee exclusive and the seeds are $0.13/each which for Burpee is not too bad.

There are several more black tomato heirloom seeds here. Many of these are Russian heirlooms. No one is claiming any mold resistance for these seeds. If you gardened last year, you know that the wet spring wiped out many tomato crops. I don't have a big enough garden to experiment with questionable disease resistance.

One of their seeds is called Black, and here is a flavor review from Hanna, the Illegal Gardener.

I am tempted by this seedless tomato (available from Burpee but not exclusive.)  The question is "How do you get a seed from a seedless tomato?" The answer I suppose is hybridization. The hybrid is seedless, but the parents are not. Seedless tomatoes are not new, but the seeds do make the flavor more bitter -- probably more nutritious too.

The award for ugliest tomato picture is this, Ananas Noire; it must taste good or no one would offer the seed. It is supposed to be black tomato too, but obviously it is especially color-blind catalog writer.











!!See my previous tomato posts: Feb 09 on the 2009 Garden, and black Kumato tomatoes.!!

Lycopene - Here is a 1933 reference.


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Tomatoes are in the Ground

I put the tomatoes in the ground Saturday.

This year there are five tomato varieties:

Sun Sugar - Pinetree Seeds
Sun Gold - Pinetree Seeds
Black Cherry - Pinetree Seeds
Best Boy - Burpee
Black Truffle - Burpee

This reflects my recent preference for the flavor of cherry tomatoes, Sun Sugar, Sun Gold and Black Cherry are all cherry tomatoes.

I started them all inside in February, and happily several of them have small tomatoes already, and all five have flowers. This promises some early harvesting. The goal is to have the tomatoes set fruit inside because once they are outside, it will too cold for pollination until June.

I have planted them in Wall-O-Waters. At left is a photo, but someone else's yard, as it was too dark and rainy to photograph mine.

The patent on Wall-O-Waters must have run out because now Burpee is in the store with "Aqua-Shield," which is the same thing, but shorter and wider.

They are clever because they are simply plasticized PVC film filled with water. If a freeze comes, the plants won't freeze until after the whole water-filled shell freezes. Since a few hours at 28 F would not do that, the plants are safe.

I expanded the garden by a about a third this year. This is part of my annual over-enthusiasm for gardening that I get every Spring. I turned over sod, and treked in new topsoil from Home Depot. I am compensating the fact that the strawberries have taken over a quarter of the garden themselves.

I need to get the peas and lettuce started.

!!See this post for my early season harvest -- such as it was.!!

Supermarket Tomatoes Lack Chloroplasts in the Fruit -- that is why They Taste Bland.

Depth of Processing readers probably think that I am obsessed with tomato posts, but Cuong Nguyen at Cornell found a mutated gene in most cultivars of tomatoes that reduce the number of chloropasts in the tomato fruit. 


This gives the fruit a more even color, so that tomato buyers will think a fruit is uniformly ripe even when it is not. 


Importantly, it turns out the chloroplasts also kick out tasty, flavorful chemicals too. This means the commercial varieties are going to taste poorer. 


Haven't you always wondered why commercial growers did not try to breed flavor into the fruit? 

These tomatoes have chloroplasts and have uneven color.

It helps explain why radically different cultivars like Kumato taste better. Check out my Kumato blog post --one of the DoP blog's most popular.  Kumato is a black tomato created relatively recently from salt-resistant cultivars on Galapogos.

Anana Noir, a French tomato, touted for flavor, that
clearly does not ripen evenly. 

Other people claim that Pruden's Purple is one of the best tomatoes for taste, and it is a large, dark and irregularly ripening fruit.  At right is Anana Noir, that ripens very irregularly, but which is supposed to taste great.

This does not help me with why my orange cherry tomatoes taste so good. Perhaps it is because they are so sweet?


The big question going forward is, what will commercial growers do now. Will they look for another way to get good appearance while retaining the flavor producing chloroplasts, or will appearance prevail?

2009 Garden

Looking forward to Spring is one of the best parts of Winter.

The garden for 2009 is planned out. Of course, does the real garden ever look like the plan?

My flower garden in Michigan is far smaller than the ones in Wisconsin or Minnesota. It is a lot of work, and the previous owner left me flowerbeds where no one can see them. I need to see the flowers every day if I am going to maintain enthusiasm for it. Anyway. Flowers are going to be Impatiens and Profusion Zinnias --yes just two varieties. I need to order seeds today. I know that I could buy Impatiens as nice as I could grow, but it is still fun to grow them. I think my north flower border is too sunny for impatiens, so its Profusions this year.

I really wanted to replace the impatiens totally with some perennial groundcover this year, but my wife has a right-brain attachment to flowers lining each side of the walk. This would be OK if she wanted to help grow it.

In the vegetable garden the big story is the strawberries, which are now in their third year are thriving and taking up more space. I will enlarge the garden going north to make a little more room. I have big hopes for the strawberry crop this year.

There are five tomatoes:

Sun Sugar - about the sweetest and tastiest cherry tomato you could want.

Yellow Pear - never grew it before, but it had good reviews

Black Cherry - Which is a trendy purply cherry tomato. Jenny got some at Whole Foods. Maybe these seeds will taste the same.

Burpee Supersteak Hybrid - against my better judgement, beefsteak tomatoes seem prone to disease and slow ripening. Still the one or two that you get are nice.

Burpee Best Boy - A nice looking tomato, but it is determinant -- meaning that all the tomatoes ripen at the same time. Why would a home gardener want that?

Calliope Hybrid Eggplant - I have been eating more eggplant, and this was a nice variety from last year.

Another favorite is my Pineapple Tomatillo. These cherry size tomatillos are sweeter than standard ones and have a fruity taste. They are about the messiest vegetable ever, and the squirrels got well over half of them last year. I'll take a better picture of them too --the photos online are not so good.

Pimento is back this year after a decade on hiatus. I am tired of growing hot peppers that are too hot to eat. Pimento is nice and fleshy and not hot at all. I also get a better yield of red fruit than bell peppers. I don't like bell peppers anyway. Last year's Italian peppers were failures.

There are also cucumbers, spinach, arugala, zucchini.

Green peas are on the bubble. They take up lots of space, and the rabbits love them. If it were possible to buy fresh peas, I would never grow them. Maybe just a few plants.

Gone this year are the true peppers, basil (I never really liked pesto), kale (Did I eat it once last year?)  I am hoping to get Jenny to do the potted flowers on the deck. I have lost interest in those.

In the fall, I expected a much smaller garden, but then I get over-enthusiastic every Spring.




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See the update post on how this garden turned out. 

The Tomatoes are in the Ground: Wall-o-Waters

In keeping with the Spring mood, I planted my tomatoes today. 

I use Wall-o-Water, which are these water-filled plastic tents. They help root development, and plants do better than sister plants that I keep under the lights inside. 

The Wall-O-Water protects the plants by sacrifically freezing before frost could damage the plant inside. They also help warm the plant like a little green house during the day. 

I have three variety's this year: Burpee Big Boy, Yellow Pear, and Black Cherry. 

My Vegetable Garden for '12

This year's garden got a very early start because I could work the soil back in MARCH -- global warming came though with lots of great Spring weather.

Big changes this year are: 

++ Bye-bye Strawberries. After three terrible seasons, I have torn them all out. They kept sending runners so they grew into a mat of tiny strawberries -- each one too small to make fruit. I also tore out the blueberries which have been doing NOTHING.

++ Hello EIGHT tomatoes. Last year, I nearly had CROP FAILURE when the late blight stuck. I put in twice as many this year. I am also growing a few in different ways like, some in Wall-O-Waters and some without. Some staked and some running. And five different varieties. No heirlooms either -- only blight resistant hybrids.   

++ Catnip continues to takeover more real estate. Jenny likes it though. 

++ Asparagus - despite the asparagus jinx, I have big health asparagus ferns this year. [The asparagus jinx is that I always get transferred before I get a chance to eat the asparagus. In the last house I delayed planting it because I did not want to move. Later I got cocky thinking it was just a superstition, and I planted some, and then --- I got transferred. So the healthy crop this year is making a prediction. . .]

++ Marigolds - This year I have marigolds in the old strawberry patch. They are in a bed rather than a border. Sofia French Marigolds in front and  American Marigolds in back. 

++ Miracle Grow -- This year I am a commercial for Miracle Grow. After last year generic products, I am back to name brand fertilizer. I know it is all the same, but Miracle Grow is a good product at a good price. 

Varieties

Burpee's Big Boy. Vigorous and fairly self-supporting so far.

Early Girl Improved. This is the vigorous one;
The less vigorous one produced a fruit on 8-June:
Early!

Acorn squash grown from a sweet variety
we bought at the store. 

A Snack Attack Tomato. Looks good. I'll let you know how it tastes.

This is my Sweet 100. Very vigorous. I have had
two cherry tomatoes so far. Both were from flowers that set inside.

Other crops are basil, peas, eggplant, peppers (pimento), and leeks. The peas are strong, and falling all over each other. 

See my older garden post from 2009, and the 2010 tomato posting.

Are Potato peels nutritious?

There is an urban myth or perhaps wives tale that potato peels or "skins" are the most nutritious part of the potato. I decided to look into this a bit.

First of all, the starchy center of potato is not very nutritious from a vitamin and mineral point of view -- although it has good energy value -- but most people don't see that as advantage. The peel and the cell layer just under the peel are more differentiated, and has a wider variety of compounds. Some healthy and some less healthy.

The main effect of cooking a potato in the skin is that it prevents vitamins and minerals from being leaching out. 22% of vitamin C is leached away when boiled in the skin as compared to 42% loss when boiled without the skin. One can always not eat the skin when it gets to your plate, to avoid the less healthy compounds, and the starchy flesh is more nutritious.

The skin contains some minerals like potassium and calcium at higher levels than the flesh, but it has anti-nutritional ingredients like phenolics, glycoalkaloids, and nitrosamines. By anti-nutritional I mean chemicals that can have upsetting or even toxic effects.


The greenish skin of potatoes is unhealthy, and many recommend it be cut away and discarded. It contains solanine, which is a toxic glycoalkaloid. The structure is at right. You can see like the name says, sugar residues and a big alkaloid. Typically a potato has 100 mg/kg of solanine, but green potatoes have 1000 mg/kg, and the potato peel itself is 100 times more concentrated than the potato/peel mixture.

On the other hand solanine is not the worst toxin. It causes diarrhea, fever, and cramps, but can cause coma too. It affects calcium and potassium transport in cell membranes. One population study showed a correlation with the birth defect spina bifida, but this has not been confirmed. Green tomatoes are a much more serious source, and green tomatoes should never be eaten raw. Solanine has a bad flavor, and people avoid foods high in solanine based on taste alone, unless they are starving.

A 25 mg dose has been taken as a practical threshold for nausea. This would be about 25 g, or perhaps a large tablespoon of green potato. Strangely this is only 250 g of standard potato, so this must happen fairly routinely, and or the 25 mg dose number is not that meaningful or valid.

The potato peel does not take up much of the mass of the potato, so its nutritional value is almost undetectable. This is from a New Zealand potato board study. Based on this, there is little difference if the potato is peeled or not. For example there is a two calorie difference -- more for the unpeeled.

In conclusion, people should not eat the skin. Very little advantage and why eat these potentially harmful substances?