Lehman’s Country Life

One of the most appealing aspects of growing your own food is that you can enjoy a higher quality diet because you don’t have to rely on having your vittles transported hundreds or even thousands of miles to your table. Varieties that boast better flavor and nutrition than what you might find in the market but which are passed over in the commercial world simply because they are too tender or delicate to “ship well” can be yours. What’s more, you can enjoy these foods at a lower cost – and with a little planning ahead, for nothing!

Anyone who has ever grown their own lettuce has probably neglected one or two plants, and as the season gets on they start to grow in a peculiar way: upwards, instead of outwards. This is known as “bolting.” Salad eaters know that the lettuce harvested in this condition will be tougher and more bitter tasting, and so the plants are generally yanked and tossed onto the compost heap. But if they are allowed to go through their full cycle, the tall stalk they produce will soon be covered in attractive little flowers. If pollinated, these blooms will contract and then dramatically expand (like dandelions) to form a delicate sphere of feathery threads, soon cast to the wind. This is the reason why the plant has developed its stalk, to give these floating messengers the best chance of wide dispersal. Each carries a cargo of a single lettuce seed, to start a new leafy generation. With a little careful husbandry, these seeds will be yours to plant, nurture and consume.
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Even though it makes sense that your tomato vines should be at their largest and lushest on the longest day of the year –June 21^st— to get the very most out of summer’s life-giving sunshine, they probably won’t get that enormous until July or maybe even August. Their growth depends on photoperiod (how much light they get every day), climate (how warm and how cold – the smaller the difference, the better), how much they’re watered, and how much they’re fed.

As regards nutrition, around every two weeks I give my tomato vines a light fertilizing with liquid fish emulsion. This is a thick slurry of just what you might think, namely old rotten fish mush from the commercial fishing trade’s copious waste; it comes in a concentrated form in a gallon jug. You mix this with a unit quantity of water (usually 1 tablespoon per gallon) and apply it with a watering can, or just out of a bucket. I mix it a little bit lighter than indicated on the jug’s instructions, and give it to the plants as a substitute for the second watering.

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At this time of year in your garden, spring has definitely sprung and the threat of frost is either past or diminished to near zero. You’ve weeded, double-dug and enriched your tomato beds and they’re looking so beautiful and inviting you’re tempted to climb in, yourself. The few young weeds that have sprouted since bed preparation have been ruthlessly eliminated with but the slightest effort.

In the greenhouse or the cold-frame, or maybe just that sunny window ledge –a pretty crowded one, by now— are your gorgeous, bright green tomato starts in their 1-gallon pots, some of them a foot high or more and threatening to get even leggier if you don’t do something. But hold those horses, because there are a few small steps yet to take.

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A few weeks ago we were sprouting our tomato seeds and pricking them out to be paired up in four inch pots.  It’s likely that a few have died since then, but most of them ought to be lusty growing things by now, bearing one or more sets of true leaves.  The first (immature) leaf set will be smooth-edged, but the second set ought to start looking like a familiar tomato leaf with its irregular serrated edge.

After ten days or so, your paired sprouts might do with a little more food.  Give it to them in the form of very dilute liquid fish emulsion.  It’s an excellent and widely available fertilizer, but may prove an issue if your sprout pots are still in the house in that sunny window (particularly if they don’t have a catch basin under them) or if you have a cat that finds them now strangely and irresistibly interesting thanks to the fish.  A greenhouse, even a small one barely big enough to stand up in, is a terrific boon to have for these occasions; the next best thing is making use of a friendly neighbor’s greenhouse.
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By this point we shall assume that you, the intrepid future tomato gardener, have acquired the seeds of the variety (or varieties) that appeal most to you. If you’re a tomato fan it’s likely that you enjoy more than one example of the “love apple,” as it was known centuries ago. You might also be keen to try a new one along with your old favorite — but even if you’re just beginning with one cultivar, you’ll need to germinate your seeds to get started.

Vegetable seeds require heat, light, air and moisture to sprout. At first they don’t actually need any soil; the seed itself contains enough ‘food’ to get itself started with a set of immature leaves and rootlets. Even if seeds are set in a rich medium, all the soil will do is hold up the sprout as it unfolds, not feed it. Believe it or not, it’s actually a bad idea to germinate your seeds in a rich planting medium. The reasons are mold and mildew.
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Year after year, surveys invariably discover that the Number One Favorite Veg of America’s backyard gardeners is the tomato, in any of its diverse forms – and often as not, in more than one of them. Why? It’s not just the pleasure (or even the economy) of being able to “do it yourself.” The reason is quality of flavor.

You don’t have to be an epicure to tell, in a single bite, the difference between a store-bought tom and a home-grown one. It’s hardly surprising why. Your typical commercial tomato begins life many hundreds of miles away from you –sometimes thousands of miles!— and has to endure picking, cleaning, grading, inspecting, packing, shipping, unpacking, and then being displayed…before it ever gets to your shopping cart, let alone your dinner table. The goal of the commercial tomato grower is to produce a fruit that looks good after the above ordeal, one that looks so good you’ll want to pay money for it. What it tastes like isn’t an issue, at the produce stand.

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If you’re looking for the true Taste Of The West, look no further than a freshly picked, mesquite-roasted “Chili Pepper,” better known to the botanical world as Capsicum.  This enchanting fruit had been domesticated in Ecuador for nearly 7,000 years before it was discovered by Europeans in 1492.  Captain Columbus encountered it in powdered form while in the Caribbean, and eager as he was to promote his new route to “India,” brought back the pungent spice (as well as a few unhappy natives) as proof of his success: he’d been to “India,” so they were “Indians,” so the spice must be “pepper,” the most popular and widely traded seasoning of his day.  Of course he was wrong on all three counts, but curiously we are afflicted with his errors even today; we still call the original Americans “Indians,” and Capsicums are still commonly known as “peppers.”
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In the distant undemanding past, in those trouble-free days B.C. (Before Children), unburdened as we were even by cordless telephones, car alarms or e-mail, my wife and I were given a fluffy eiderdown comforter as an anniversary present. I expect it cost a fortune as my mother, the donor, was typically generous with this kind of thing; it certainly seemed big enough, sitting there all boxed up on our porch one afternoon, like a smallish hippopotamus packed for transport. I fancied the FedEx driver must have felt grateful to get half his van freed up for the trip home.

Interestingly, the comforter after being unpacked started to expand itself even further until it assumed its full pneumatic grandeur, an impossibly soft slab almost as thick as our mattress and considerably broader.  A Colossal Comforter.  We were impressed.

I still remember the look of serenity on my wife’s face when she wrapped the thing around herself to give it a test-drive: the poor woman nearly melted with delight.  She was instantly warm - toasty, snuggly, deeply warm, maybe for the first time since we’d moved up to Northern California from balmy Los Angeles a few years previous.
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There is nothing quite like the harvest time, but some fall seasons can bring an embarrassment of riches. Not so long ago, the neighborhood where I live was one of California’s premiere apple growing regions. Even though most of the old farms have given way to more lucrative wine grape cultivation, the months of October, November and December still bring thousands of pounds of fresh local apples to the marketplace.

The familiar popular varieties are all there - your Fuji, your Rome, your Delicious (red and golden), your Granny Smith - but who among us knows the delights of the Bellflower? Or the Star-king? Or the Hortley? In an apple growing region you can sample the lusty Stayman Winesap, the doughty Arkansas Black, the versatile Gravenstein, the stupendous Black Twig, or even the beguiling Sleeping Beauty, and buy of each in quantity.

True to the American commercial tradition, you can save a lot of money under the unit price if you purchase in bulk, so a whole box is always the best buy - and yet the iron that entered the soul when all those 50-pound crates of apples were purchased at the orchard tends to oxidize when those boxes are lugged into the kitchen and just sit there, waiting for you to DO something with them.

Three handy solutions are: DRY ‘EM, PIE ‘EM, AND BUTTER ‘EM.
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