Tomatoes, Queens of the Garden

Sure, we gardeners are capable of growing everything from azuki beans to zucchini, but let’s not kid ourselves: the real reason for anyone to even think of growing anything in the first place is to possess, sometime in late summer, those succulent, sweet-tart, juicy tomatoes, whose flavor can’t be bought anywhere else. For my neighbor and me, tomatoes hold the central ground in our gardens. We baby them, carefully tending and transplanting the seedlings. We cage them and stake them and fertilize them lovingly. For their sake, we pick off large caterpillars—hornworms and corn ear borers—with our bare hands, and then smash their guts out on the ground.

It’s not just the taste, either. The tomato is a singularly rewarding plant. If it’s happy and well watered, it keeps growing until it makes a jungle of the gardener’s neat rows. It becomes heavy with fruit that balloons out in a satisfying way until it reaches the desired proportions. Then we have the satisfaction of watching the fruit ripen and become just a bit redder every day until it becomes as pleasingly fat and uniformly bright as a clown’s nose.

In a fit of experimentation (and not wanting to be outdone by the Man with the Perfect Lawn), I planted five varieties of tomatoes this year: Green Zebra, Sweet Pea Currant, Roma VFN, Early Girl, and Top Sirloin. The latter three had all been relatively successful last year, and represented three basic types I thought my garden should always have: the Italian tomato, so piquant in salsas; the early; and the big, muscular, highly impressive beefsteak. I mixed together my Romas and a Green Zebra with some cilantro, garlic, and an Anaheim pepper for a salsa that had more than the usual zing and tartness, so different from the vinegary flavor of the stuff sold in jars at the supermarket.

I chose not to plant Brandywines, deeming them too troublesome. After a long spell of hot, dry weather, followed by torrential rains, last year’s Brandywine tomatoes had all split down the middle, attracting those ugly, small insects that burrow into exposed vegetable flesh. The few Brandywines that ripened properly were mealy in texture. It might have been the weather that did it, but I felt that even an heirloom variety should prove hardier than that.

Instead, I tried the Green Zebras, just for fun. When ripe, they are yellow, with green striping and green flesh. Disappointingly, however, they tasted much like ordinary red tomatoes—perhaps just a little less sweet, but without enough difference to matter much. The plants also yielded little fruit, compared to the other varieties. I might plant them again, but like a blond news anchor who only knows enough to read the TelePrompter and crack silly jokes, they will be kept around primarily for their looks.

I grew the Sweet Pea Currant Tomatoes in planters, as they seemed too delicate for the main garden space. Their seeds were the size of grains of sand, so small that I wondered whether they could germinate successfully. But germinate they did, and the small, fine-leaved plants prospered after I put them in the big flowerpots. They soon started producing feathery yellow flowers that seemed too tiny to attract pollinators. Somehow, those flowers gave rise to hundreds of pearl-shaped tomatoes. When ripe, the tomatoes were thick-skinned but sweet—and something of a chore to pick, because there were so many of them. A hundred of them could fit into the palm of my hand.

But all these tomatoes, though lovely to behold, are also a cause of great anxiety as fall approaches. (Yes, it may seem like the seasons have shifted already, but technically, we have three more days of summer to enjoy, if you include today.) I am keeping careful track of nighttime low temperatures. The Man with the Perfect Lawn says that tomatoes lose their flavor when the temperature dips below 50 degrees. I haven’t found information to corroborate this, but I have read that it’s important to save them from frost. Also, according to this account by Carl Wilson of the Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, if a tomato is entirely green, it may not ripen at all. With that in mind, I have decided to leave my tomatoes on the vine as long as possible before the first frost is upon us.

We’ll see who is right. The gardener with the most tomatoes wins the race. Since my neighbor planted his several weeks earlier than I did mine, he has an advantage that is probably unbeatable. Still, I’ll do my best to catch up (pun intended!). I will give the tally when the last fruit rolls in.

Cucumber Coterie

When I saw the season’s first cucumber forming beneath a thick mass of leaves and vines (which I haven’t succeeded in attaching to a trellis), I thought it would take a long time for that finger-sized object to get big enough to pick. In just a few days, however, the cucumber grew to blimp-like proportions. When I cut it in half, its seeds were almost the size of cantaloupe seeds, slick and fat. No matter—I enjoyed eating it anyway. I sheared off the thickening skin, scooped out the seeds, and sliced the flesh lengthwise. I inserted the slices in a roast beef sandwich and took a big bite. The cucumber flesh, still warm from the garden, was as tender and rich as butter, and had a creamy, rich sensation wholly unexpected in a vegetable.

Since that day, some two weeks ago, I’ve harvested perhaps fifteen more cucumbers. They are all lovely, but I’ve begun to wonder if I should learn how to pickle. Not that these are pickling cucumbers, exactly; they’re the burpless variety, which means they’re valued for their thin, chewable, not-so-bitter flesh and their supposedly smaller-than-average seeds (and for their supposed digestive properties, including the quality of producing less burping in the burp-susceptible eater), rather than for their keeping properties. Conventional wisdom holds that “slicing” varieties of cucumbers, unlike traditional pickle cucumber like Gherkins, are liable to lose their crispness in the pickling process. So the best thing to do is to enjoy them as much as possible, and to spread the wealth by giving away what remains.

The good thing is that cucumbers, with their mild flavor and soft flesh, are among the most versatile of fresh veggies. I’ve used them in salads and sandwiches, sliced in rounds, squares, and slivers. A few nights ago, I made a cucumber salsa with diced cucumber, some hot peppers (the Aurora variety, from my garden), garlic, cilantro, salt, and lemon juice. I’ve also had them on their own, either with a homemade vinaigrette dressing or as fresh pickles, softened with salt.

My mother used to make fresh pickles by slicing the cucumbers as thin as potato chips, salting them down, mixing them with pieces of lemon rind, and placing the mixture in a big bowl. She then covered the whole with a small plate weighed down by a pitcher full of ice. I used to enjoy the citrusy, salty, slightly crisp slices that emerged from this process, several hours later, but I haven’t had the patience to try making them myself.

This has been my first experience, as an independent gardener (that is, in managing my own garden rather than helping out with the family’s plot), of taking a bountiful cucumber crop. Last year’s cucumbers were rather disappointing: stunted by the lack of nutrients in the soil, the few fruits that appeared were small and thick-skinned. Two of them were ball-shaped—rather pretty and comical to look at, but also sad reminders of the general failure to produce. I wonder when the cucumbers will stop producing as much. My great hope is that the cucumbers will continue to yield for a good while after the tomatoes start turning red. A garden cucumber alone is magnificent, but a home-grown cucumber with a real, honest-to-goodness, juicy, fresh tomato is a slice of paradise.

Swiss Chard: A Flavor of Its Own

When I ran out of refrigerated greens today, I decided to make a stir-fried dinner with some Swiss chard. The gardening manuals say you can start picking outer leaves off the chard plants after they reach six to eight inches in height, and a few of my plants had already grown a foot high, so it was time to sample the stuff.

I’ve read in many places that chard is something of a miracle plant. It grows tall and luxuriant through the heat of summer, long after the spinach flags and the lettuce starts to bolt. It can be eaten (they say) raw or cooked, and can serve as a replacement for spinach in many dishes. To all of that, I say “Ha!”

Lush and verdant though my plants may be, they are not at all similar to spinach, and that’s as it should be. Swiss chard is not, after all, closely related to spinach. It is a member of a beet family, a kind of great-aunt to our modern-day beets, the lone remnant from a time when beet family plants were grown for their leaves rather than their roots. While spinach is tender, chard is tough. Its leaves are much chewier than spinach leaves, and they have a much higher concentration of salt.

Since I am not among those who like to eat chewy, salty leaves raw, I prefer to cook my chard. It takes very little effort to soften those leaves and mitigate the salt flavor—just a minute or two of sautéing or steaming. Even then, though, Swiss chard tastes very little like spinach. It doesn’t have quite the same quality of sweetness mixed with bitterness. I like the flavor for itself, a slightly bitter, slightly salty taste that spurts onto the tongue, for the stems of Swiss chard retain a juicy springiness if they are cooked just until tender.

My favorite gardening manual, Home Grown: Growing What You Eat and Preserving What You Grow, by Denys de Saulles, says the individual leaves of Swiss chard should be pulled, not cut, because they bleed when cut. Accordingly, I pulled three leaves from the outer edges of three different plants, with no apparent ill effects to the plants (other than the loss of the leaves, which, if they had any feelings about the matter, they would have keenly resented). They were big, substantial leaves shaped like Chinese fans, yet their stems were still thin and elegant, unlike the hard, wide stems of the Swiss chard I had bought in grocery stores.

They are gone now, of course. I sautéed them with a section of thinly sliced kielbasa, a single clove of garlic (minced), some delicate strips of zucchini, chopped basil, and some chives, then mixed the whole stir-fry with spaghetti, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I ate the mixture in two installments, and the Swiss chard held up well after being reheated in the microwave. It’s not a miracle, but it serves well in any dish that requires something green, flavorful, and vaguely crunchy. Better yet, it looks really impressive in the garden, and the big, boxy seeds are easy to grow. If you want to look successful, plant Swiss chard (and protect it from the bunnies).

First Pickings: Bibb Lettuce, Tender and Leafy

When I cut the largest head of Bibb lettuce the other day, I was surprised to see that the leaves bled a white, opaque liquid. I’ve never had lettuce that fresh, even from a farmer’s market. According to this Web site run by the George Mateljan Foundation, that milky liquid gives lettuce both its bitter flavor and its Latin name, Lactuca sativa. It is also said to be a mild narcotic, though I must say it hasn’t affected me in the least.

Bibb and Boston lettuces are usually among the most expensive varieties at the supermarket. As a result, I don’t buy those loosehead varieties as often as I do Romaine or red leaf lettuce, even though I love their tenderness and pretty, gently ruffled leaves. Now I have a whole garden full of Bibb, and I am harvesting the reward of all those mornings and evenings spent keeping an unprepossessing collection of seedlings evenly soaked.

That first lettuce head was almost too pretty to take. I made a magnificent salad of it, using locally grown tomatoes and cucumbers (my own haven’t borne fruit just yet), and some pasta shells. For dressing, I mixed some white wine with fresh lemon juice, rice vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a few herbs from the flowerbed: dill, chives, and basil. The dressing had to be light but special enough to set off my beautiful prize, and the result was a summer meal that any oil baron or potentate would covet.

Having dealt with cabbage worms in the past, I was skeptical about growing any leafy vegetables, but the lettuce has been surprisingly undisturbed by pests. Perhaps it’s because of the radishes . . . but that’s another story. Suffice to say, those succulent, light-green whorls are gorgeous, and I feel privileged indeed to dine on them, one by lovely, sweet (and ever so slightly bitter) one.

I will have to pick them all before they bolt, for a blooming lettuce is an increasingly hard and unpalatable plant. Last year, when I let a head of Romaine bloom in late summer, it produced a remarkably tall, ugly stalk, topped by a set of mangy, yellowish flowers. Though it is a pity to take them out, go they must, for the greater good of the garden—and of me, naturally.