I decided to grow my beloved potatoes anyway and incidentally I found these Maris Peer seed potatoes at the local nursery:

I don’t think people normally grow this potato variety around here but I recognized the name from forums so I decided to try them out.

Normally I’m chitting potatoes for a couple of weeks. When you do potato chitting make sure the shoots don’t grow too long or they’re likely to break off during planting:

I bought three cheap plastic pots for this purpose – notice the 16 drainage holes in the bottom:

These holes will let the water pass through the soil and prevent rot in tubers and roots caused by water standing still. This will of course mean that you’ll have to water more often. Especially if you use pre-fertilized peat moss like I did, which in hindsight probably wasn’t the best choice:

My new small container garden two months ago – this is a trade-off between space to play on for the kids versus growing space for kitchen gardening:

From the left there are three ceramic containers with new small blueberry bushes, in the middle are my three potato containers / pots, and the two large tubs in the back to the right are for herbs and spices. In the front to the right are three fruit bushes which we donated to the kindergarten.

The potatoes grew big but some of the foliage turned yellow so I decided it was time to harvest the tubers. I would have liked to see flowers develop before harvesting but for some reason they didn’t. Maybe the plants needed some kind of nutrient which would also explain the yellow leaves:

Fortunately the potato tubers were in there, looking healthy!:

I was very happy to find 1.2 kilos of potatoes (2.6 pounds) in those three plastic pots:

The last couple of years we have made the same simple potato salad from our new potatoes.

600 g boiled new potatoes, marinated in these ingredients:

• 1 tsp. garlic, chopped
• 3 Tbls. olive oil
• 1 Tbls. sesame oil
• 3 Tbls. lemon juice
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. freshly ground pepper
• (2-3 spring onions, sliced) (didn’t use it this time though)
• 2 Tbls. sesame seeds as garnish

Yum!

What’s your favorite potato variety? And feel free to add more simple potato recipes you might have, that you want to recommend to others.

Photo by Girl Interrupted Eating.

I love black currant. I planted a black currant bush on my old property and watched it grow and deliver a good crop of delicious berries. In my childhood home in the late 1970s we also had a few large, high yielding bushes, that we kids would rip completely – if we could get there before the birds. So I wanted to take a closer look at the actual benefits you get from black currant, and looking over the page on black currant on Wikipedia I realized that the situation in the United States is, and has been, very different from the situation in Europe and in Denmark, where I live. I turns out that in the U.S. where most of you guys come from, the black currant has been banned since the early 1900s, because it would carry white pine blister rust, a threat to the logging industry. Only in 2003 has the ban been lifted in the state of New York, but there are quite a few black currant benefits so it makes totally sense to  consider getting one of your own in your garden. I’ve made a list:

• High content of vitamin C: 100 g of black currant contains 302 % of recommended daily intake of vitamin C!
• High yield: 5 kg of berries per bush per per year
• The fruits can help prevent heart disease, cancer, microbial infections and Alzheimer’s disease.
• Oil made from the seeds in the fruits reduces eczema or rash in newborns, if their mothers consume it while they are breast-feeding the babies.
• Good levels of potassium, phosphorus, iron, vitamin B5 and dietary fibers.
• Black currant has a unique flavour used in sauces, meat dishes and desserts. Some claim it will heighten the taste of Guinness stout – I’ve only tried it in Vodka though

So what are you waiting for? Go get your own – and check out my post on how to prune the damn thing: How to Prune Black Currant

(found it on sacramentogardening.blogspot.com…)

This ebook on how to grow tomatoes is written by Lucia Grimmer and Annette Welsford. Lucia has a Masters Degree in Plant Pathology and works as a technical nutrition specialist in the fertilizer industry. Annette has a partial degree in Horticulture. For me as an amateur grower this puts some weight behind the 37,000 words on the 73 pages. I paid $34.90 + $8.72 VAT to get the ebook in .pdf format down on my PC. You can get the ebook here: How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

It’s a very comprehensive book with many details so I’ll limit myself and only talk about the things that were new to me.

Definitions

A term I often see when reading about tomatoes is determinate versus indeterminate. In the book there’s a good clarification of what this means:

• Determinate types are the low ones, up to 1 meter. The tomatoes are picked over a few weeks in a concentrated crop.
• Indeterminates grow up to 5 meters and are picked over 12 to 20 weeks.
• Semi-determinates grow up to 2 meters and are picked over 2 to 6 weeks.

Water

There’s a lot of information on watering in the book but some things stood out to me because I realized that I have probably made a huge mistake earlier on with my tomatoes, and potatoes for that matter.

To water correctly you need to soak to a depth of 15-20 cm. So far so good. But you need to do it early in the morning, and only the soil must be watered. No water on the leaves, for God’s sake. If the leaves do get wet it’ll dry off during the day. That’s why you should water in the morning. The problem with wet leaves is that it will be a heaven for fungus and disease spores. If you have read about my 2010 tomato disaster you’ll know what I’m talking about. Drip irrigation, mulching to prevent soil splashing, and water in the morning. That’s the way to do it.

Reproduction

Pollination is still a confusing subject to me. I don’t know if it gets any clearer but apparently tomatoes are self-pollinating according to the book, because the flowers contain both the male and female organs. At least it’s beginning to make sense to me, why a heirloom variety can stay with one grower for a lifetime without outside DNA material. But then again, you wouldn’t want that with humans, right? Weaknesses would build up, but I guess tomatoes can handle that somehow.

And a good tip on propagation: Save your clippings and dip them in a seaweed solution or plant hormone powder. Then plant them in a pot, and you’ll soon have en new tomato plant. That’s easy

Fruits

The advice on the actual tomato fruits goes against what I believed you should do, but the authors recommend picking the fruit before they even have the right color. Thereby the plant will focus its energy on the remaining fruits. Makes sense. The picked fruits should be kept away from sunlight or they’ll overheat and ripen unevenly. Makes sense too. Green tomatoes should be placed in a warm location to ripen at 18 – 21 C (64 – 70 F).

Tips & Tricks

• One way to plant out your tomato seedlings earlier in the season is to use a ‘wall of water’. It’s a device with several vertical tubes filled with water surrounding each pot. The water absorbs heat during the day and releases it during the night.
• The book also has a tip on compost that’s new to me: Earthworms hate onions. So keep onion scraps out of the compost.
• If you use red plastic as mulch on the soil below your plants they’ll think they’re overcrowded and grow even more. I think it has something to do with the color of the fruits?
• In an organic garden you should consider using neem oil / margosa oil if you want to actively fight pests. It has been used in India for a long time against almost any type of insect.
• A greenhouse made from polyethylene has several advantages: Low cost, ease of replacement, high light transmission and good heat retention. I didn’t like the artificial look, but with all these advantages it’s quite interesting compared to traditional glass.

What I LIKE about How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

• It comforting to know that even the experts from the industry agree that the quality of supermarket tomatoes is very low these days (no flavour, few varieties, hard as apples).
• A chapter about biodynamic growing is included.
• Quote: “The advent of Genetically Modified Food is a revolutionary change to our food that offers no nutritional improvement, but increases the profitability and market power of global seed and chemical companies. Changes include incorporation of pesticides and weedicides within the DNA of the plant. If the ingredients and chemicals were properly labeled, like our processed food, some might be defined as pesticides!” Oh? And we’re supposed to eat that?…
• It comes with a huge online variety database
• The book covers the whole world and considers different growing conditions depending on location.
• Great info on heirloom versus hybrids.
• Easy to read and understand.
• Thorough nutrition problem key to use if you find sick looking plants, so that you can diagnose and treat the problems.
• Includes organic bug killing recipes.

What I DON’T like about How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

• Some of the text on the illustrations is unreadable.
• It’s important with references but I prefer to have all of them in the last chapter and not ind the middle of the book.
• Pictures and charts should have a higher resolution in the .pdf version.
• The book mentions that drowned snails can be tossed into the compost heap. I don’t think that would be a good idea as they would attract slugs that would eat the dead ones. At least that’s what Arion lusitanicus would do.

Who should buy How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

It’s a very comprehensive book and a lot of the information is not directly related to tomatoes but of course if you’re serious about growing tomatoes you would need to know all of that too. And the specifics about tomatoes are in there too, so if you want to build a business around growing tomatoes you’re all set. A complete beginner could probably do with half the price, half the number of pages and half the details. The fertilizing scheme alone makes my head spin, despite the fact that I’ve already grown almost 10 kilos of tomatoes.

I doubt I’ll ever need another book on tomato growing so if you serious, knock yourself out and buy this one. If you haven’t grown a single red one yet you could probably do with less.

You can get the ebook here: How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

I did manage to save some of the fruits for seed saving. 9 fruits from Black Plum tomato plants and 2 from Cherry tomato plants:

I finally gave up on the rest of the fruits – the harvest is a mix of green and red tomatoes. At least we’ll be able to pickle the green ones:

I came across a tomato for seed saving with this special pattern:

I think I’ll name it Black Plum 120, as in 120 degrees, or maybe Peace. I just need to grow the missing vertical bar in the bottom of the peace symbol I’m excited to see what the offspring from this particular fruit will look like.

I realized that fresh coriander taste and smell very different from the dry powder you buy in the supermarket. I really don’t like the taste or smell of it – I think it’s synthetic in some way. I’ve decided to collect the seeds instead hoping the taste is better:

The seeds need to dry before grinding so I cut down the entire plant and hung it upside down next to the spinach plants:

Hopefully the seeds of both the coriander and the spinach plants will be ready soon. I need the coriander spice for my falafels

Luckily it seems that the leaves affected with blight just dries up and breaks off and don’t cause damage to the main stem of the tomato plant:

I removed the affected foliage and tomatoes and the plants are beginning to look healthy again:

Time will tell if they’ll survive long enough to produce mature tomatoes. As you can see in the picture above there are not many leaves left to do the work.

… which is exactly the problem with my broccoli and cauliflowers too – them caterpillars hungry!:

What I should have done was to grow these plants in a tunnel so that the mother of these caterpillars couldn’t have laid her eggs on the plants when they were small.

Oh well – I’m actually proud that the plants grew this big. Besides the damage done by caterpillars the plants look really healthy. Next year I’ll build a tunnel. And oh – we actually did harvest one broccoli, a real nice one too.

This is the log describing the food I brought in from my garden grown in 2010. I wrote a post called My Garden Layout in 2010 if you want more details about the garden.

———————-

Leeks:

2010-10-10: 1 pcs.

Total:  1 pcs.

———————-

Tomatoes:

2010-10-05: 2525 g (green), 1894 g (red)
2010-09-21: 223 g (yellow, Elin)
2010-09-16: 53 g (Cherry)
2010-09-05: 582 g (green)
2010-08-29: 2237 g (green)

Total: 5344 g (green), 1894 g (red), 223 g (yellow, Elin), 53 g (Cherry)

———————-

Apples:

2010-09-14: 2304 g.
2010-09-13: 1250 g.
2010-09-08: 1182 g.
2010-09-07: 2125 g.
2010-09-04: 2460 g.
2010-09-03: 2145 g.
2010-09-01: 907 g.
2010-08-25: 1371 g.

Total: 13.7 kg.

———————-

Beans:

2010-09-21: 1103 g.
2010-09-13: 464 g.
2010-09-09: 579 g.
2010-09-05: 1084 g.
2010-08-29: 444 g.
2010-08-25: 1083 g.

Total: 4757 g.

———————-

Broccoli:

2010-08-12: 1 pcs. (129 g)

Total: 1 pcs. (129 g)

———————-

Cucumber:

2010-08-31: 1 pcs. (404 g)
2010-08-10: 1 pcs. (146 g)
2010-08-02: 2 pcs. (411 g)
2010-07-31: 1 pcs. (266 g)

Total: 5 pcs. (1227 g), 245 g/piece

———————-

Strawberry:

2010-08-12: 37 g
2010-08-10: 37 g
2010-08-09: 81 g
2010-08-08: 120 g
2010-08-06: 27 g
2010-08-05: 81 g
2010-08-04: 350 g
2010-07-31: 42 g
2010-07-30: 88 g
2010-07-29: 287 g
2010-07-24: 44 g

Total: 1194 g.

———————-

Peas (Kleine Rheinländerin. Some from seeds saved in 2009.):



2010-08-14: 627 g (seeds saved)
2010-08-05: 39 g
2010-07-31: 42 g
2010-07-29: 530 g
2010-07-24: 720 g
2010-07-23: 400 g
2010-07-21: 311 g (63 pcs.)
2010-07-20: 95 g (22 pcs.)

Total: 2137 g.

———————-

Red beet:

2010-08-13: (43 g)
2010-08-04: Long (802 g)
2010-07-24: 8 pcs., long (1345 g)

Total: (2190 g), 154 g/piece

———————-

Squash (Zuboda):

2010-10-06: 1 pcs. (230 g)
2010-10-05: (1917 g)
2010-09-20: 1 pcs. (473 g)
2010-09-09: 1 pcs. (611 g)
2010-08-31: 2 pcs. (1098 g)
2010-08-25: 3 pcs. (5189 g)
2010-08-10: 3 pcs. (1057 g)
2010-08-05: 2 pcs. (598 g)
2010-07-29: 2 pcs. (589 g)

Total: (11.8 kg), 656 g/piece

———————-

Radish (Cherry Belle):

2010-08-04: 9 pcs.
2010-07-08: 15 pcs.
2010-06-10: 10 pcs.
2010-06-09: 20 pcs.

Total: 54 pcs.

———————-

Carrot (Nantaise 2, summer):

2010-08-13: 1294 g
2010-08-04: 8019 g
2010-07-24: 3078 g

Total: 12.4 kg.
———————-

Potatoes (Asparagus / Almond):

2010-09-21: 1593 g.
2010-09-13: 825 g.
2010-09-11: 613 g.
2010-09-09: 1018 g.
2010-09-05: 995 g.
2010-09-04: 957 g.
2010-08-31: 1078 g
2010-08-29: 1132 g.
2010-08-27: 1121 g.
2010-08-25: 1395 g
2010-08-24: 1321 g (2 plants)
2010-08-15: 1863 g
2010-08-12: 1051 g
2010-08-11: 956 g (2 plants)
2010-08-08: 1629 g
2010-08-05: 557 g
2010-08-02: (2 plants)
2010-08-01: 899 g
2010-07-28: 1112 g (2 plants)
2010-07-27: 876 g
2010-07-25: 676 g
2010-07-24: 1162 g

Total: Appr. 24.0 kg (appr. 42 plants)

———————-

Total: More than 81.0 kg of food from the kitchen garden in 2010.