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Tangled Branches: Cultivated

happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia

Saturday, February 27, 2010

GWR

...means Green When Ripe, when referring to tomatoes.

I can't make up my mind what I think of them. Last year I grew two kinds - one intentionally and one unintentionally. The intentional GWR was 'Green Zebra', which seems to be one of the better-known ones. It's a "modern heirloom" variety, by which I mean that it wasn't passed down from generation to generation, but bred in the current generation by a current plant breeder - Tom Wagner. I got off to a bad start with 'Green Zebra'. Out of 14 tomato plants, it was the only one attacked by a cutworm. Luckily I found it before it was too wilted, so I just stuck the cut-off stem in the ground and it formed roots and grew. But it was a bit behind the other plants in setting fruit.

I should back up at this point and say that 2009 was not a easy year to grow tomatoes. The weather was cold and rainy until about July (as I remember it), and I had B trouble in the garden all season - Bugs, Blights, and Beasts. I think the tomato leaf spot disease was Bacterial Spot. All 14 plants were affected to some degree. I didn't notice any spots on the fruit, but lost most of the foliage on many plants. I picked off and burned the spotted leaves, but the problem persisted all season, even after the weather turned warmer and drier. Then the Beasts began to nibble on the tomatoes just as they started to ripen, so I resorted to picking them early and leaving them to ripen in a protected spot. I know a lot of gardeners do this routinely, but I don't. Or didn't.


You can see the tomato diversity of my garden pretty well, but the photo also illustrates another of my problems. All the variously-shaped pink, black, yellow, bicolor, and even green tomatoes have crowded the basic round red tomato right off my planting list. I tried to remedy that last year but was frustrated by the performance of my selections. 'Lida Ukrainian' bore a small number of unremarkable fruit. 'Bloody Butcher' also produced sparsely - I did admire the color, flavor and size, but there were darned few of them to admire. 'Break O'Day' made a huge healthy plant, not too badly damaged by the leaf spot disease, and laden with large numbers of perfect round fruit. I thought Wow, this is going to be the one. I waited for them to ripen. And waited and waited and waited....Gee, this is taking a long time to ripen....eventually, they looked like this:

The skin turned yellow, but the inside stayed green.

It tasted though, exactly like a ripe red tomato. And a pretty good one too. So. Was this a case of stay pollen? A mutation? A stray seed? But this kind of thing happens when you only grow one plant of each variety. In 2008, my favorite 'Black Russian' tomato produced pink fruit. The plant was from the same batch of seed I'd been using for several years. In 2005, I bought a plant of 'Green Zebra' which turned out to be a red cherry tomato. And last year I gave a 'Break O'Day' seedling to my parents and that plant produced the expected round red fruit.

But back to GWR tomatoes. After you've layered multicolored slices for a fancy-looking plate of tomatoes, or made a reverse salsa (green tomatoes, red chiles), what do you do with the rest of them? I chopped some up and put them in the freezer. They're still there. Green spaghetti sauce? Green chili? I did toss a few in some Indian dish where the color didn't matter, and that's probably how I'll use the remainder, but more from a frugal sense of duty than any real enthusiasm.

Any suggestions? If I can't think of more ways to use the GWRs they probably won't be invited back.

Labels: tomatoes

posted by Entangled at 8:40 AM
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