It’s the month of March! This means it’s definitely time to get started growing vegetables such as tomatoes, eggplant and peppers from seed. I’m planning to get some going this weekend, but before I do that I need to try to decide what varieties of tomato I want to grow.

My collection of heirloom tomato seeds used to be quite extensive, but I seem to have misplaced, lost or thrown away the majority of my saved tomato seeds over the last couple of years. This year I am working on rebuilding my collection for trading and re-growing in the future.

There are literally hundreds of varieties of heirloom tomatoes out there, and while I certainly have grown many types, there are even more that I haven’t tried. Since I have tomatoes on the brain, I’m also planning a post about my favourite heirloom tomato varieties so far.

Among those I’ve recently acquired:

Aunt Ruby’s German green—I’m interested in seeing how this one compares to Green Zebra.
Garden Peach—I am super-excited about growing this tomato as I’m told it actually has a fuzzy skin, like a peach. I absolutely MUST see this tomato in action!
Zapotec Pink Pleated—I had this in the garden last summer but if memory serves correctly it fell victim to cutworm. Lesson learned!
Dwarf Medium Ruffled Pink Oblate—A friend gave me a seed packet containing either this tomato OR the next on my list. So we’ll just have to wait and see which one it is!
Mountain Princess Dwarf—See above.

Other seeds which are on their way to me:

Southern Exposure is sending these three for me to try out:

Good Neighbour—I just like the sound of this one, especially since I often give tomatoes away to friends and neighbours.
Yellow Mortgage Lifter—I LOVED the pink mortgage lifter tomato, so I’m eager to see if its yellow counterpart measures up.
Black Prince—Any black or purple tomato I’ve grown has been delicious. I expect Black Prince will be no exception.

Either Limbaugh’s Legacy Potato Top or Sicilian Saucer, which I will grow as part of Kelly’s Populuxe Seed Bank project.

Who knows what else will arrive in the You Grow Girl Annual Seed Exchange this year? The package has made its way across the country and is now in Ontario. It should make its way to me soon.

Now I’m off to wash up some pots and get planting…

I’ve already shared my love for the new-fangled, brightly-coloured tomato cages that I’ve seen in the garden centres around town. What I don’t love about them, however, is the price tag. I have ten tomato plants in the garden this year, not including volunteers. At $9.99 each, that would be about a hundred bucks in tomato support I am just not willing to spend. (I’d rather buy more plants…)

I decided to mimic the effect of the painted tomato cages with my tomato stake project for the vegetable garden.

For this project you will need:

• Sturdy lengths of wood. The pieces Graham picked up for me at Home Depot are made of pine and they are about 3/4″ x 2″ by 10′. Each length makes up two stakes. Count up your tomato plants or other plants requiring staking and do the math to determine how many pieces your garden will need.

• Brightly coloured paint. I checked out the mistint section of the paint department at Home Depot first, but there was nothing bright enough for me. Instead, I grabbed these small tubes of paint from the craft aisle at Wal-Mart. They were about two dollars each, so I could try several different hues.
• A good paint brush.
• A work bench or set of saw horses to lay the wood on while painting.
• A saw for cutting the painted lengths in half.

I placed the wood on the work bench and painted each piece in a different colour. I had to let one side and edge dry before flipping them over and doing the other side and edge.

When they were dry, Graham cut the pieces in half on a diagonal to create a sharp point for driving into the ground.

Graham installed the stakes by pounding them into the ground about 4″ away from each tomato plant with a mallet.

I like the effect a lot! And I sure like the cost. The whole project came in under $25 for all ten stakes.

Other ideas for this project:

If you have children, allow them to paint the stakes, adding swirls of colour or designs on the wood. Nate is still a little bit young for this kind of involvement, but he “helped” with the installation.

Add weather-proof stickers to the stakes or stencil on shapes.

Use pretty lettering or calligraphy on each stake to indicate the variety of tomato planted at each one.

I like using stakes much better than tomato cages. I simply pinch out the suckers as the plants grow and tie them to the stakes to support the growing plants and keep the ripening fruit from the ground.

I don’t usually like tomato cages, but I love these brightly-coloured epoxy-coated tomato cages. $9.99 each at Kingsway Greenhouse in Oshawa.

(Not a sponsored post, I just think these cages are really cool, and they’ll serve as inspiration for a little project I have in mind.)

Another gardening-related contest arrived in my inbox today!

5 people will win tomato seeds by leaving a “nice” comment on one of the posts on Cynthia Sandberg’s beautiful blog, Grow Better Veggies. Five people will be chosen at random to with a three-pack of rare tomato seeds from TomatoFest.com.

As Cynthia says in her latest e-mail newsletter, TomatoFest.com is

a fabulous on-line resource for over 600 different types of heirloom tomato seeds.

Sounds like a great contest to enter!

Oh, dear, it’s been over a MONTH since I posted here! I can’t believe it. My only excuse is that I’ve been busy gestating. Our baby is now officially three days overdue, actually.

There hasn’t been much action out in the garden since early autumn. My husband, Graham, helped me out a lot this year in getting things cleaned up out back. We actually managed to clip back all of the perennials and he helped me pull the finished plants from the vegetable garden after we harvested the tomatoes.

This year we didn’t keep all of our harvest to ourselves, preferring to keep things simple and give a lot of it away to friends and family members. (Although we did, of course, manage to roast several big baskets of tomatoes and froze four large ziplock bags of roasted tomato sauce.) Our next-door-neighbour traded us some nice little potatoes that he grew for some of our tomatoes, too.

Baskets of homegrown tomatoes, peppers and eggplant for our friends and family.

That little veggie trade had me thinking, actually, that since there are three of us now in a row on my street who grow vegetables, we should try to co-ordinate a little bit, and share our harvest.  We could collectively grow more food than we could individually.  I’ll have to give this some thought over the winter!

But now here it is, late November, and it’s been an unseasonably mild autumn this year, for which I’m grateful. Now there is the potential for snow flurries this coming week, the same week our new family member is expected to arrive (we have an induction scheduled for Monday).

I hope that although we’ll be busy with the new baby, I’ll have more time in general to devote to writing online over the coming year. We’ll be sure to post when the baby comes!

It’s raining! Do you know what this means? It means we’re saving water today. It’s pouring from the roof into those rain barrels and that is good news for the garden, for our planet and for our bank account.

Over the weekend I potted up my tomato seedlings into larger pots. I’m growing surprisingly few varieties of tomato from seed this season, compared to other years. I have some more seeds that a friend sent me, but I think I’ll just save them for next year. Now that it’s almost May, it’s getting a bit late for starting tomato seeds. This year I’m growing:

• Black Plum
• Red Currant
• Amana Orange
• Marianna’s Peace

I’ve grown Amana Orange before, and I’ve purchased Red Currant before, but the others are new to me, so it will be interesting to watch these new varieties grow in my garden.

Red Currant tomatoes growing in my Toronto garden in 2004.

Speaking of tomato seedlings, I’d like to draw your attention to my latest post at Suite101.com, How to Pot Up Tomato Seedlings. If you are growing tomatoes from seed this season, this tutorial will come in handy.

The temperature here today in Bomwmanville is 38 C (100 F). In October. On Thanksgiving. It’s a new heat record. I usually have some gardening to do on Thanksgiving Monday, but never before has it been this hot. Canadian Thanksgiving is a harvest celebration, and today I celebrate the amazing harvest I have been blessed with in my gardens this year.

I harvested this basket of goodies from the back yard yesterday. The red peppers are mostly Fish peppers, a hot Jamaican heirloom. I think I’ll pickle them whole. The rest of the peppers are jalapeno, both red and green.

Yesterday we went over to the community plot and harvested the rest of the tomatoes. We have four grocery bags filled with them, which means more roasting this week. I honestly think I harvested three or four bushels of tomatoes from the plot this year. Crazy! I also cut the sunflowers that were in bloom there. The largest one had been snapped off over the garden fence by someone who either really loved the flower or really hated it. Either way, I didn’t want to lose the rest of the blooms to strange hands, so I brought them home and they grace my dining room table. Here you can see how morning glories were growing up the sunflower stalks. I let the vines be, and I think they add something pretty to the arrangement.

Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian friends.

One of our favourite ways to eat fresh tomatoes from our garden is homemade bruschetta. Many of the recipes I’ve come across instruct the cook to peel and seed the tomatoes, but I’ve found that if you use a variety of tomato that has fewer seeds, it really isn’t necessary to do either, and as for the tomatoe’s skin, a little extra fiber in your diet never hurt. This time around, I used the Roma tomatoes that grew as volunteers in our community garden.

For this recipe, you will need:

About six Roma tomatoes, or another variety that you like to eat. I’d love to try to make bruschetta from green zebra tomatoes!
Half an onion.
Two large sprigs of fresh basil.
A splash of extra virgin olive oil.
A clove of garlic, finely chopped.
Freshly ground pepper and salt, to taste.
A baguette or other bread that you like.
Garlic spread.
Freshly grated parmesan cheese, if desired.

Core and dice about six tomatoes. I like to use a pretty bowl, of course.

Chop onions into pieces about the same size as the tomato dice. Add to the tomatoes.

Finely chop basil and add to the mix.

Finely chop the garlic and toss into the bowl. Add salt and pepper.

Drizzle some olive oil over the ingredients, and toss gently to combine.

Allow bruschetta to sit at room temperature for at least an hour to allow the flavours to combine.

Meanwhile, slice the baguette in half. We like to use a multi-grain baguette (see note above re: fiber). Spread garlic spread on each half.

Lightly toast the bread, and cut into individual serving sizes. Top each piece with the bruschetta mix and, if desired, freshly grated parmesan.

Serve immediately, then bask in the glow of your admiring guests!

It’s officially September! For many gardeners, this time of year is marked not only by brisk mornings, dewy toes and the bittersweet appearance of one’s breath hanging in the air, but the preservation of the harvest.

I’ve discovered the great joy that comes from canning the fruits of my gardening labour. I’m hooked. I need more jars!

So far this season I have made “Zany Zucchini Pickles”, “Zesty Zucchini Relish”, “Red Hot Sauce”, Mexican- and Italian-style tomatoes, “Garden Vegetable Salsa” and most recently “Dill Sandwich Slices”. So far I have kept very much to just one book (seen in the left sidebar), with very good success.

In my garden the most bountiful crop, as you will not be surprised to read, has been by far the tomatoes. As the first frost date approaches I will be determined to preserve every last ripe (and green) tomato in the yard so we can enjoy their rich flavour throughout the fall, winter and early spring. The easiest way to do this is to pack them, uncooked, in jars. If you have the Bernardin book that I recommend, the instructions for doing this are entitled “Raw-Packed Tomatoes with No Added Liquid”. I’ll assume you have some basic knowledge of canning. If not, I recommend picking up this book. It contains really great, detailed instructions for canning all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and a lot of recipes, too. I started using it last season and it’s looking pretty weathered already.

Here’s my basic canning set-up. On the back left burner is the huge pot I use as a boiling-water canner. I bought it a few years ago at No Frills for ten bucks. It holds five 1 liter jars or 7 pint jars. Inside is a canning rack that sits on the bottom of the pot. On the back right burner are simmering lids. The front left burner is for boiling water to peel the tomatoes, and the front right burner holds a pot for recipes like salsa that require cooking the tomatoes first. For the raw-packed tomatoes, you won’t need this last pot.

There are more photos after the jump. Hope you’ve got a high speed connection!

Place a bowl of cold water next to the stove.

After preparing your jars and lids, you will need to peel your tomatoes. You need approximately three pounds of raw tomatoes for each 1 liter jar, or a half pound if you’re using pint jars (500 mL).

Before peeling, though, I like to sort my tomatoes by variety so that each jar contains mostly the same kind of tomato. This isn’t by any means absolutely necessary, it’s just my preference. Here I have a bunch of Paul Robeson tomatoes. I’ve removed their stems in preparation for peeling. Beside them is a bowl I use to collect compostable kitchen waste. I throw the tomato peels and cores into the bowl to add to my compost pile out back.

To peel your tomatoes, score an “X” into the bottom of each fruit.

Carefully drop several tomatoes into the boiling water for about 30 seconds, or until you can see the peel beginning to pull away from the fruit.

Using a pair of tongs, move the tomatoes from the boiling water into the bowl of cold water. One by one, remove the peel from your tomatoes (remember to compost!) and cut out the core.

Cut the peeled fruit into halves or quarters and reserve in a separate bowl.

Continue to peel and quarter your tomatoes until you have the desired amount.

Next, you may need to add salt and citric acid or lemon juice to your hot jars. You will need to consult your own recipe, but for the one I use, for 1 L jars, add 2 tbsp of bottled lemon juice (1 tbsp for pint jars) and 1 tsp course salt (1/2 tsp for pint jars).

Pack the tomatoes into the jars until juice fills in the spaces and you have a half an inch headspace (the space between the top of the jar and the food inside).

Pack each jar, one by one, place the lids and screwbands and process in your boiling-water canner for 85 minutes.

After 85 minutes have elapsed, remove the lid from the canner, and allow the jars to sit in the hot water for five minutes before removing.

Label and store. Eat! Remember summer!

Earlier this summer I made some notes about things happening in the garden I wanted to remember for next season. One of the things I had written down was, “Banana Leggs…don’t grow again, too scraggly.”

While it is, indeed, quite a scraggly-looking determinant variety, this type of tomato is so prolific that I have completely changed my mind about growing this one again. From the four plants I have in my garden, I have harvested literally hundreds of fruit, and more are on the way.

They are a paste tomato, perfect for making a sunny, yellow sauce. The downside to preserving these tomatoes is that their shape makes them a little bit difficult to skin and core.

This tomato is one of the most fun to give away, since most of my friends and family have never seen them before. I will have to grow them again, although I could probably get away with just two plants rather than four.