Tomato Time

Its Tomato Time in Plantersville. Don't know why it took me so long to get into tomatoes on a bigger scale........I used to just stick a few plants in 5 gallon buckets and ate tomatoes for a couple of months right off the vine. Then I bought a tractor. Then I figured since I had the tractor and had the land why not put in a crop. Then I started looking into tomatoes and what to plant. To my surprise, I found several thousand varieties. Red, pink, yellow, black, orange, chocolate and every color between those. Then there are smooth, ribbed, pear, peach, stuffer, tear dropped, heart shaped, cherry, giant, medium, small, heirloom, hybrid, determinate, indeterminate, dwarf, early, mid-season, late season, fall, spring, summer....it goes on. There are tomatoes to withstand the heat, tomatoes to withstand the cold and tomatoes to withstand everything in-between. There are tomatoes for hot houses, cold frames, staked, caged and sprawling. There are tomatoes that are named for every thing and every name in the world. A tomato can cross breed with another tomato by mistake and you can name it after your dog.

Commercial companies have taken over the seed business. They pretty much grow hybrids as it takes a little more work to grow a heirloom and years ago some folks started a seed saver exchange just for saving the heirloom tomato and other vegetables to ensure the heirloom seeds would be saved for future generations. My catalog this year is as big as a the Houston telephone yellow pages. 462+ pages big.
Many, many seeds have been brought over to the states from other countries by escaping whatever they were being prosecuted for.
Anyway, last year I planted 135 tomato plants but only about 15 varieties. I sure had a good time eating, canning and making my own tomato sauce, salsa and tomato juice. This year I now have 62 plants in the ground and of those 62, I have 52 different varieties planted. I am gonna find out sooner or later which is the best tasting tomato there is. Of course, it goes without saying that the first tomato of the year from your garden is gonna be the best tomato ever eaten and not anything like the cardboard taste of store bought tomatoes. A store bought tomato is shipped green to a processor that puts them in an airtight room and gasses them to turn them red. They look ripe but they are just as green as a green one on the vine. To acquire a truly great tomato one must find a local vegetable stand or even better, come see me. We will go out to the garden with a salt shaker and enjoy the outdoors eating ripe, juicy tomatoes. Just name your color. Come on over. You just might find a sweet onion or jalapeno growing nearby.

I wonder how many different cabbages there are?