Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Thursday, December 10, 2009
December Tomatoes
Did she say December tomatoes? Yes! But it isn't like they came fresh from the vine today. This one has been "ripening" since mid-October when we frantically picked all we could before the frost. I think it may be the variety 'Persimmon', but in our haste we didn't bother to sort the tomatoes by variety - just dumped everything into any container we could find. We'll call it Persimmon. Or maybe Kellogg's Breakfast. Or maybe even a Virginia Sweets. One of the big yellow ones anyway. But I think it's Persimmon.
A good many of those hastily harvested tomatoes never "ripened" but this one did and we ate it for lunch today. It wasn't the same as a mid-August tomato, but it wasn't bad either. I scrounged a small amount of coriander/cilantro from the garden this morning, but unless we get a heat wave, that will be all until spring.
Earlier in the week I made a sort of pasta all'Amatriciana with some other varieties of tomatoes that had "ripened" off the vine but those weren't as good as today's.
With all the precipitation of the last few weeks the garden is sloshy soggy. The deer have been making their presence known by eating almost every green thing left in the garden, and now they're wading ankle-deep in mud to do it. Well maybe I exaggerate a bit, but the hoofprints are quite deep. And they've been eating things they are reputed not to like. Onions for example. So it's just as well that I didn't get my fall onions planted. The ones the deer are eating were the perennial types that I left in.
I'm content to just let the garden go for a few months. I like vegetable gardening, but it's very time-consuming. So time-consuming that I didn't write half the blog posts I had planned. Maybe I can make the clock run backwards, writing up the garden events in reverse chronological order. By the time I get caught up, we'll be back to spring and time to begin again.
2 Comments:
Look, gal, if you got homegrown tomatoes at this time of year, you are a very lucky gardener. All we got is tough swiss chard, some decent parsley and new lettuce under cover.
Tabor: I was surprised at that tomato - a little shriveled at the top, but otherwise perfectly good. But, sadly, that was the last one. I didn't get any late-fall crops planted at all and now I'm thinking how good somre fresh lettuce would taste. ;-)
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