FarmTina

Video: How to Prune Your Tomato Plants Throughout the Growing Season

Thanks to Meg at Brooklyn Homesteader, I found this easy to understand video demonstrating the proper way to prune your tomato plants, which results in a healthier plant with higher tomato yield. It's so basic yet it makes a huge difference-- take a look:

Using Up My Tomato Yield

Well, I'm back home from vacation and I'm glad to report that the The Self-Sufficient 8-Day Garden Machine experiment was a success!

I made that watering set up to take care of my garden while I was away on a week-long romance vacation in Montreal. In the great Frenchie Canadian city, I discovered a food that I can't believe I've never eaten before: Sweet Tomato Jam. Holy crap, sweet tomato jam!

Photo from Flickr by FotoosVanRobin // Used under Creative Commons License

We stayed at a bed and breakfast called A L'Adresse Du Centre-Ville that went above and beyond expectations each morning preparing a 3-course breakfast for a full house of guests. The hostess served pancakes with strawberry rhubarb sauce, fruit and nut bread puddings, and a balsamic scramble with salsa, among other things. Her specialty was an assortment of fresh homemade jams with new flavors each morning, including carrot-orange, tomato-walnut, and citrus. But the jam that really blew me away was a sweet tomato-lemon!

As soon as I got home, I searched online and found a similar recipe from my fave dude Mark Bittman. It calls for tomatoes and chili peppers, which is perfect: those are the two veggies that are filling up my garden at the moment. But even though it has spicy and savory ingredients, the recipe also calls for sugar, cinnamon, and ginger, which should be interesting.

Here's the super-easy recipe I used, taken from the NY Times:

Saving Tomato Seeds

I'm sure you remember how freaking excited I've been about my Brandywine Tomatoes- they are an heirloom variety whose lineage can be traced back to the 1800s thanks to frontier American farmers and the Seed Savers Exchange. I'm continuing this rich history by saving my Brandywine Tomato seeds to plant next year!

Saving tomato seeds requires more work than just pulling them out of your tomatoes and putting them in a bag until Spring. It has been a 4-day process that included some SERIOUS mold!

How to Save Your Tomato Seeds

ONE: Collect Your Supplies

All you need is a cutting board, a knife, a small bowl or cup, some cheesecloth or papertowl, and of course, a tomato! You want to save seeds from your strongest, healthiest tomatoes and plants. Plants are just like people in that the baby resembles the parents. So, the seeds from a strong parent plant are most likely to hold the genetics for a strong baby plant.

Tips For Growing Tomatoes

Now that tomato growing season is in full swing, there are a few things I need to do to maintain my 'maters. If you don't maintain the 'maters, they won't mature into fully ripe tomatoes and you won't have any tomato sauce to impress your mom with! My mom is a vegetarian Italian chef, so the only thing that really impresses her are good tomatoes (and blog entries about good tomatoes).

Take a look at my two giant tomato plants! You'll notice some small yellow flowers all over the place. When these flowers are pollinated, the petals will fall off and the flower bud will grow into a tomato. Ideally, every place you see a flower will become a fruit.

The (Dirty) Old Farmer's Almanac

They say a person is never interested in hearing about your dreams unless they were in the dream or it was a dirty one. Well, last night I dreamt about the farm, and baby, was it dirty.

Photo Update: May

Here's the latest photo of FarmTina, taken this morning:

The corn, in the top row blue bins, is doing amazing! I can't believe how much it already looks like cornstalks. I guess that's obvious because, ahem, it's corn, so of course it looks like corn. (SHUT YOUR MOUTH. I'm a city girl. I've never actually seen a corn plant in real life before this!)

Also, I just put in the Brandywine Tomatoes I've been raving about, in the left-most green Rubbermaid tub.

Still waiting to be transplanted (aka, still growing in my mini-greenhouse-kitchen): green beans, eggplant, and another tomato plant of a different variety. I'm so close to being done! Well, done with the planting anyway...

You can keep up with farm photos on my FarmTina flickr account.

Growing 121-Year Old Tomatoes

This is a great day: my Brandywine Tomato plants have arrived!

I plant my vegetable garden each year directly from seeds, usually saved from my own garden in previous years. When everyone else lost their tomato plants to disease a few years ago, mine were perfectly healthy because they hadn't come from commercial tomato growers. I don't like to buy plants that have already been started in greenhouses, it's like adopting a child at age 7: You're still getting a child, but he could have lots of problems cultivated during the time before he was adopted. Is that a mean thing to say?

Anyway, this year I made an exception and I purchased a Brandywine tomato plant! After reading about it's history, I had to experience the legendary plant (and it's fruit) for myself. The heirloom Brandywine tomato is gigantic and pink, with cracked skin and bumpy green shoulders. The taste is sublime and the yield is high.

This is all great and wonderful, but the real reason I'm obsessed with these tomatoes is that the seeds can be perfectly traced back to 1889, when they first appeared in Philadelphia's Johnson&Stokes seed catalog (see image above).