Friday, November 24, 2006

What's Growin' On: 11/24/06



Realization Of The Day:
This would have made a perfect Christmas salad, but it sure tasted good on Thanksgiving.

The tomato is a VFN, an easy to grow, disease resistant, heirloom salad variety that has been a mainstay in my garden for years, and whose boring name comes from the first letters of the three diseases it is resistant to: Verticillium wilt, Fusarium wilt, and Nematodes. I picked it (and many others) back in mid-October when the nighttime temperatures began to plummet. It's been living in the cool pantry all these weeks, slowly turning from green to red. While the flavor was (understandably) not comparable to its warm from the sun, vine-ripened counterparts, it was still very, very good--and a glorious addition to the holiday table. Is it wrong to be so thankful for a tomato?

The tomato is resting on a pile of freshly picked arugula and baby Swiss chard from the greenhouse. What you can't see are the perfect little Nero di Toscana Cat Cabbage leaves hiding underneath. I have several dozen small plants still thriving in a raised bed outside, as well as a few from my original spring planting. If it's possible, I think I love this stuff even more than when I wrote about my romance with it back in September.

And yes, believe it or not, that is indeed a tiny worm on the arugula. I was surprised to see it, considering we've had several mornings in the teens, and even if it had been hunkered down in the greenhouse it still must have been awfully cold. But, while its hundreds of ravenous and ruinous friends and relations were one of the banes of my organic gardening existence throughout the spring and summer, my first thought when I discovered this one last night was that it was actually kinda cute.

It must have been the champagne.

5 comments:

  1. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving! The tomato looks yummy. I do resort to buying tomatoes from Costco once in a while in the winter (only if they have at least a bit of tomato smell!) and they at least give the memory of summer tomatoes.

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  2. Christmas salad! I think that would make a nice Christmas card! And Happy Thanksgiving too. We ate one of the pumpkins, but no tomatoes.

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  3. And I suppose this is supposed to be "inspiring", too? Farmgirl - you are amazing.

    My neighbors still have tomatoes on the vine and it is *all* I can do not to reach over our fence and grab one. And we have one of those halvsey type fences between our yards. You know, the kind that only comes up to your waist? Yeah, see, that makes it really hard. They're lucky I haven't harvested the whole crop.

    Happy Thanksgiving!

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  4. What a gorgeous picture! I set it as my desktop background; hope you don't mind.
    I don't remember how I found you, but I made your cranberry scones this evening for my husband to take to work with him, and they turned out lovely... except for the last batch, that he was supposed to be watching. They were slightly crisper than necessary...

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  5. No, it is not so wrong to love a tomato *sobs*
    Mine petered out the end of August and I'm in withdrawl.

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