Seeing Red: Do Tomatoes Really Have a Favorite Color?

Who would ever imagine that plants have a favorite color? Turns, out, Tomatoes do!

According to research work done in the 80's and 90's, tomatoes do have a preference for color! It has been well documented that yields can be as much as 20% higher when tomatoes are mulched with either red plastic, or alternatively, a red colored mulch. I have employed both methods and both have produced excellent results. I must admit that I'm a bigger fan of biodegradable methods, and therefore, have gone to the red colored wood mulch. You'll want to be sure that if the wood mulch is enhanced with color, that it is a good, safe choice to use in your garden....and it will specify on the bag the range of uses it is suitable for.

Here is a link to one of the better-known studies in this area. Some of the most well-regarded studies were done at Clemson University in South Carolina. This is a link to a PDF that will explain why it works, from the light rays and spectrum to absorption levels, and, well, you can look it over yourself to find out more than you ever wanted to know! But red mulch for tomatoes does rock!

http://ddr.nal.usda.gov/bitstream/10113/18007/1/IND44088287.pdf

Fresh Picks-Koko Loko Floribunda Rose

This is my pick to try this year for a new rose variety. It's a Weeks rose, so I'll need to find a retail source, but I think it sounds really intriguing.

Koko Loko™

2012 Intro

(cv. WEKbijou) PPAF

Floribunda - Milk chocolate changing to lavender

So unusual…it looks good enough to eat…or maybe drink in this case. The cocoa is creamy like latte. But the latte goes loco to finish all lavender! You just can’t imagine a milky chocolate-colored bud would mature to be a solid soft lavender blossom. Early to bloom, every lovely bud spirals open with impeccable show form. The flowers last long on the plant & in the vase. Beyond its novelty, there lies a great plant….rounded, handsome & bushy…chock full of green leaves.

• Height / Habit: Medium / Rounded & bushy
• Bloom / Size: Medium, double, very well formed
• Petal count: 30 to 35
• Parentage: Blueberry Hill x Pot o’Gold
• Fragrance: Moderate
• Hybridizer:Bédard—2012
• Comments: Warm weather brings out the lavender.

How to: Never too Early to Talk Tomato Tips

A Quick Tomato Primer, because, you can never be to rich, too thin, or grow too many tomatoes! This is a quick and basic informational piece on tomatoes that I wrote two years ago. Everything still applies. 

 It's that time of the year......that all gardeners look forward to. What shall we plant, and what wonderful yields will we realize? The coming season is always full of potential. I have had friends ask me in particular about my favorite tomato varieties and some other information regarding these home gardener's favorites. There's nothing like a home grown tomato, is there? I'm pretty passionate about my tomatoes. Anybody that knows me well knows that. So let's talk Tomatoes!

A quick primer on a few terms you see in descriptions~

  Tomato vines are either Determinate or Indeterminate.

• Determinate vines do not need staking and harvest and bearing occurs in a two to 3 week period.
• Indeterminate vines must be staked (they go everywhere!) They will bear fruit right up until it frosts.
• Cracking, which you hear referred to a lot in tomatoes, mostly occurs when they have an inconsistent watering schedule. That's easily cured. Water them in a consistent manner, don't let them get too dry, and then suddenly flood them.

• Blossom End Rot-That's every bit as bad as it sounds. It has to be prevented-there is no cure, and once it happens, the fruit is beyond saving-just very bad. It occurs when there is an imbalance in fertility due to a deficiency of calcium. This can be averted through a good fertilizer formulated especially for tomatoes along with spray that is very effective to prevent it, if you're worried about having this problem.

 FAQ's that I hear a lot are:

Q: What are those little letters on some of the labels? What does V, F, FF, N, and T mean?

A: The little letters on many of the wonderful modern varieties of tomatoes indicate resistance to common diseases that afflict tomatoes as follows: 

• V: Verticillium Wilt
• F: Fusarium wilt, Race I
• FF: Fusarium Wilt, Race I and II
• N: Nematodes
• T: Tomato Mosaic

Without getting into a long discussion in this post, let's just say, all those things can afflict tomatoes in the Ozarks, or really, anywhere. They're bad and ugly. They can ruin your crop. And after all your hard work, who wants that? If you select a variety that is resistant to some of these things, you have just raised your odds of a successful crop. That is the beauty of modern plant breeding and varieties. Can you say Bio-Diversity? I knew that you could. :)

Q: I want to raise heirloom varieties of tomatoes and they don't have any of those letters on the labels. Is that bad? 
A: No. A good strategy for success is to select a few different varieties of tomatoes, some with resistance and some of your favorite heirlooms.The old saying is really true-don't put all your eggs (or tomatoes) in one basket-and don't rely on one variety of tomato! Depending on the weather and the conditions, you may not have any trouble at all with those things, but if you do, you have your modern resistant varieties to fall back on! Yay!

Q: What are some of Julie Brown's favorite varieties?

 A: Some of my favorites that seem to make a nice mix of varieties and have a high success rate include: 

Arkansas Traveler-actually an heirloom variety, this long time standby does have some resistance to diseases. Length to harvest: 85 days-tolerates heat and humidity well. Juicy mild flavored fruits resist cracking. Indeterminate vines resist disease. 

Jubilee-Ahhhhh, my favorite yellow. Very dependable-1943 All-America Selections Winner! 72 days. Plant produces high yields of golden-yellow tomatoes. Excellent for making tomato juice and canning. Also good in salads and cooking. A low acidity variety. Indeterminate.  

Celebrity-VFFNT Quite disease resistant! Another dependable, moderately sized red. 72 days-Consistently strong yields of deep red 8 oz. fruits. Determinate. 

Early Girl-52 days VF-Ripe fruit fast! Sets early, great tasting fruit all summer. Firm tomatoes, up to six ounces, resist blemishes.Indeterminate.  

Big Beef- 73 Days VFFNT-Old fashioned flavor and colossal size. The top beefsteak! Extra-heavy yields of 10to12 ounce fruits. Indeterminate.  

German Pink Beefsteak- 85 days – A very sweet variety that produces large, meaty, 1 to 2 pound fruits. This German heirloom resists cracking and has few seeds, making it a great canning tomato. Indeterminate vines. *I am not sure this is the exact variety I have grown-mine was a pink beefsteak-but this should be representative of it.

Those are my all time, most dependable, favorites. I like a beefsteak type, some yellow tomatoes are a nice change of pace, and I like a few different varieties, some early, some late to have all during the season. In 2010 I also added Rutgers and Delicious for new varieties (for me, anyway). Add to this a grape tomato-they will be the very earliest-they can go into your salad and tide you over until the big ones are ready-and maybe a cherry, some roma, and the specialty heirloom of your choice (I like the yellow pear), and you've pretty much got tomato garden paradise on your hands.

Photo Credit: MaplelessInSeattle on Flickr

 ~Coming Soon-Do Tomatoes Prefer Red? 

Happy tomato gardening! ~JB

What I Planted-Tall Irises

What I Planted~

This is the first in a series. I want to share what I plant/have planted in my gardens and what specimens are already there. Discovering new plant varieties and trying them out is fun! Just as some people like to thrift or any number of other hobbies, I like to collect and cultivate my flowers and (small) gardens. I have an aversion to tillers; I've never run one although I've been around them all my life. I have a compulsion to avoid getting into the trap of having to till garden all the time. Keeping the plots small allows me to do the work by hand by myself. I also use a lot of mulch. There's another benefit to all of that. I have less lawn to mow!

I add new varieties to the beds on an annual basis. Yes, sometimes things can start to get out of hand, but I try to be disciplined. The last couple of seasons' additions have been tall iris in the center bed out front.  This fall's new entries are the varieties Dangerous Mood, Cherub's Smile, Devil's Riot, and an orange whose name I can't recall. I can't wait for May!(blooming time)

The iris beds bring back memories of banks of those old fashioned ones that seemed to be everywhere when I was growing up. They were on the home farm, and at all the (elderly) neighbors, and at all the old homesteads I ever saw, it seems. Funny how a sight or sound like flowers or music can make the years just drop away. All of a sudden you are once more in that time.  I want to try to score some of those old fashioned irises somewhere. They still seem to be abundant in some areas.

The new additions-A couple of the iris pictured below are varieties I planted this fall, and the other two are were added a couple of years ago.

Photo Credits: www.irisfarmer.com a source out of California that has some 400 varieties available. I could spend a lot of time on that website.

I can't wait to see the Irises bloom this year, sort of mentally inventory what I've got-and decide what I'd like to add next.  They make great cut flowers, too. All those beautiful luxurious flower arrangments in the house make me feel quite extravagant. It's a nice feeling. Have a great week, friends. ~JB was here.

I'll have my Chickens raised Vegan and my Burgers Sans Pink Slime (Thank you very much!)

I have a great amount of pride in my Agricultural education and background. I think I can speak fairly intelligently on a wide variety of topics in agriculture subjects that include animal husbandry and food production.

It is for that reason that I was recently surprised by a couple of things I've just learned.

I'll admit, I've made light of my friends' fascination with organic and natural foods and their willingness to pay2–4 times the price for food, which, in my opinion, is no better than conventionally raised food and has been extraordinarily over-hyped in order to make (a lot of) money from people who seem to me to be out of touch with how their food is produced.

Growing up, the community of farm people I associated with worked hard and took pride in production agriculture while they embraced new ideas and technology with enthusiasm. They associated the organic movement with long haired hippies who smoked pot and ate fruit with worm holes in it and didn't take baths quite as often as they should. In other words, they viewed it as “Left Coast Radical”, I would even say.

Photo credit: The Culinary Geek on Flickr

This common sense approach to life and growing food made me think that the wild things my friends had been saying about some things of late were just too fantastic to be true. I started seeing cartons of eggs and packaged chicken that would have statements on them like, “Fed a natural vegetarian diet” and “100% natural vegetarian diet”. When I first started seeing that I thought,”Idiots! Chickens are all fed grain, of course that's vegetarian.” 

Wrong. I find that chicken parts, that's right, parts of chickens from processing, are made in to chicken feed and fed back to……chickens. They say all day long that this is OK, but it just seems wrong to me, I don't want that……take me back to the chicken houses of my youth!  I want my chickens fed……grain. Yes. Vegetarian chickens. Vegetarian eggs. So OK. Now I look for that on the cartons. It's true.

Image Credit: Nick Wheeler Oz on Flickr.

Image Credit: Marshall Astor on Flickr

Then, the other day, there was a press release. The statement was that McDonald's and some other high profile restaurants were going to stop using a “filler ingredient” in their burgers consisting of “trim from the extremities of the beef” which is more apt to contain unacceptably high bacteria populations, so they use ammonium chloride gas on it to kill that and then put it in and feed it to……people. This is done at the chain restaurants. Shaves a few cents a pound off the meat for them, amounting to millions of dollars per year. The material is referred to by some as “Pink Slime”. What?? I honestly did not know that. The burger in my freezer is grown right here on my farm and…..it's 100%…….beef -burger-meat. No filler. Or more accurately, NO PINK SLIME. Good grief. How does anybody think that's OK?

I guess I need to make sure that corporate America is following those wholesome food ethics I grew up with. Which will involve, among other things, feeding chickens a vegetarian diet and, refraining from using fillers in hamburgers. Wow, guys. You make a bad name for a good profession. Whatever else you are doing that deviates from common sense, safe, good wholesome food like I grew up with and I still produce, stop it right now! ~JB was here.