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| It was a good year for tomatoes. |
One of my favourite things about gardening is being introduced to the diversity and freshness of garden produce.
Without a garden, never would I ever have seen such wonders.
I never would have seen or enjoyed eating these veggies if it were left up to my local big box retail grocery store.
Enter Celebrity. And the big Beefmaster.
Not characters in a post-apocalyptic Hollywood dumb movie. No, they are the tomato varieties Linda and I grew this year.
They turned out to be hybrids. The Celebrity tomatoes were nice, medium sized round globes of loveliness.
The hit of the season were the Beefmaster tomatoes. They are not smooth globes, like all other tomatoes I have seen up till now.
The bulging Beefmasters grew prolifically, and the largest among them were up to 1 kg in weight. Huge!
The biggest of them all deserved to be held aloft and marched around the garden and yard.
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| 1 kg behemoths. |
It would join The Mother Of All Potatoes which I grew with my Grade 4 class after we pioneered the first ever vegetable garden at the school I was teaching at.
The prize potato was as big as a football.
The MOAP did get held aloft by a student, and marched around the schoolyard. A procession formed behind the leader.
As we snaked around the schoolyard, someone started chanting, "The mother of all potatoes, the mother of all potatoes."
Soon we were all chanting as we celebrated our successful partnership with nature, and the totally terrific tuber.
And this summer Linda and I grew The Mother Of All Tomatoes.
We honoured the MOAT and all our tomatoes by making tomato soup, and canning salsa (with the jalapeños we also grew), and stewed tomatoes with the rest.
We revelled in learning about the incredible variety of veggies that are possible when you are growing them yourself.
In the garden, every year is a discovery in the magic of nature, and the variety of foods available to the adventurous green thumb.
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| Canning salsa. |
WOW! That is awesome! What a fabulous harvest. You and Linda do so well with your gardening. I am also doing well with my food growing here. We are coming into spring and summer and I am itching to get my seeds in the ground. Every year my planning becomes better, more efficient and I grow more food for my family. Including tomatoes. This season I am trying romas as well- so I can make tomato sauce. Last year I didn't have to buy one single tomato all year thanks to the garden :) And even over winter there was very little in the way of green vegetables that I had to buy. I love reading and watching how other people garden and preserve, regardless of whether they have a lot of room to do so or not. It's so inspiring and practical. And it's what the earth needs.
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