This week in the garden 01-04-12

01/04/12

So what do gardeners do at this time of the year?

Two things: they eat from their winter garden and they plan next season(s).

 

I’ll go back to the winter garden some other day. Planning is ongoing in the garden; while we’re all good at enjoying the moment: first lettuce, first cucumber or tomato, a lot of time is spent planning weeks/months or years ahead where we’re going to plant what and how we’ll manage our crop rotations.

For the last couple of weeks now, gardening catalogs have been piling up in our mailbox, keeping the US Post Office in business, and next to my chair. The ideal is to pick a really cold day, your favorite armchair and cuddle with all these brightly colored dreams in print called catalogs and a marker to pre-select the seeds you will order. But, like with all mood enhancing elements, it is important to exercise some self control and not buy the whole shop.

For the last few years, I have been on a holy quest to find the perfect tomato. Not the cubic one that will fit perfectly in shipping crates, not the one that will keep its blandness for the next few weeks. No, the one that has the perfect taste*: a mix of real tomato flavor softened with a tad of sweetness. Every year I try several new ones and, last year, I ended up with a very fine tasting Greek tomato called Thessaloniky that had the taste of Greece and a cherry type called Cherry Roma, a miniature paste type I loved eating straight in the garden.

This year again, I’ll try a few new varieties besides the two above mentioned and I’ll let you know how they came out taste wise.

So what does a North Carolinian gardener do while Iowans wake up with the morning after hang over? He dreams of tomatoes loaded with the taste of Southern summer.

*My perfect tasting tomato story goes back many years, during my hitch hiking days. At the time, I actually was riding a train in an area of Northern Greece where donkeys far outnumbered cars and where standing by the road thumb in hand was totally useless other than to add grit to a hide that did not need any. Three of us were sitting in that little section of a third class coach heading North: an English guy I had met a couple of days earlier and a Greek grandma who , most probably, was fifteen years younger than I am now. Her face, like the local landscape, proudly displayed signs of hard living but showed a real beauty unequaled by any face cream. At a given time, she opened up the little bundle she had been carrying, pulled out a knife, some gorgeous tomatoes, a whole, freshly baked peasant bread and a big piece of Feta cheese she had wrapped in a cloth. My classic Greek and her local dialect did not quite jive but her smile and insistence we share her meal did gain us over. 

 

To this day, I have been trying to find or reproduce that tomato with its perfect taste of warm, human generosity but haven’t found it in any catalog yet.