Radishrain

So, my Black Beauty cross had ripe fruit by today. I them (there were two). One was riper than the other. The ripest one had a sweet taste to it, in a certain way (not super sweet, but definitely sweet). The less ripe one tasted the same, except with some of that tomatine-type taste (or that's what I call it) that I've tasted prominently in Coyote and Matt's Wild Cherry.

Sweetie (a cherry tomato) is the only likely candidate that comes to mind for this cross, of all the tomatoes I grew in 2017. I think Sweetie was the only red cherry I grew without anthocyanin fruit, other than some Husky Cherry Red growouts (which probably wouldn't have produced these results, and probably would have tasted quite a bit different). It should be noted that Black Beauty had surprisingly large fruit in 2017, and Sweetie had tiny fruit.

If you're interested in F2 seeds from this cross, feel free to let me know. I prefer the cross to Sweetie, but I prefer the original Black Beauty to the cross.

Here are pictures I took today of the cross. They look pink in the picture, but they looked red in person. Black Beauty in 2016 was very pink in person. The ripest one split a little while after I harvested it.





other_tomato

Here is a picture of fruit from my Frosty F. House cross (it's not representative of the remaining fruit on the plant). It was meaty and quite unlike last year's. The plant is almost a multiflora.


other_tomato

What are your favorite spaghetti and pizza sauce recipes? (Particularly those that involve your own homegrown tomatoes that you've canned.)

I never really used a strict recipe, but it struck me that there are probably some pretty good ones out there. I usually like to do something like the following:

* 2 quarts of canned tomatoes (I'd blend them up after opening, juice, seeds, and all; I think they were usually Early Girl F1 or Roma tomatoes back in the day)
* Oregano (a fair amount)
* Two or three bay leaves (remove after cooking)
* A tiny bit of garden sage
* White sugar or brown sugar (maybe a tablespoon or so; I forgot which kind tasted better; I think white sugar was the original method)
* Ground mustard
* Salt
* Black pepper
* Parsley
* Minced onions and onion powder
* Garlic powder or granulated garlic

Then I'd just cook it and mix the hamburger with it or something. I'd season the scrambled hamburger with salt, pepper, sage, and maybe onion/garlic powder or similar.

I add salt and/or extra virgin olive oil to the noodles while they're cooking.

More recently I've taken to replacing the sugar with blended up raisins (although I haven't tried it with the exact ingredient list above). Also, ascorbic acid powder can do a lot for the taste of spaghetti sauce; it can make it rich and zesty (but I'm not saying ascorbic is necessarily ideal for the aforementioned sauce, as I've not tried it with that exact list of ingredients). I like mushrooms with spaghetti a lot, too.

I've discovered that not all oregano is the same. I love some of it, but some of it has an overpowering cough drop smell. Some other ingredients may differ, too. The resulting sauce is not supposed to be bitter, btw (and it never was when I made it years ago), but I think some kinds of one/some of those ingredients can potentially be bitter. Can parsley or oregano sometimes be overpoweringly bitter?

So, what do you do to make your spaghetti sauce? What have you discovered?

I really love the smell of summer savory (which smells a lot like the oregano I like). If you have a good sauce recipe that utilizes summer savory, that would be awesome. I've attempted using it to get that good oregano taste, but I haven't quite succeeded yet (in spaghetti sauce, anyhow).

recipe_
spaghetti_
sauce_
spaghetti_sauce
bay_leaf

This thread began on our old/companion site: http://vegetables.boards.net/thread/461/west-india-burr-gherkin-cuttings

Recap: I easily rooted a single cutting in water, and then attempted lots of cuttings in the same container of water.

Anyway, I discovered that rooting lots of plants in the same container of water is a bad idea. They fermented, started to die, and didn't root. They smelled kind of good, though, for fermented cuttings, interestingly. Now I want to lacto-ferment West India burr gherkins. I think one cutting per container is best.

This thread began on our companion site: http://vegetables.boards.net/thread/459/rooting-strawberry-runners-indoors?page=1&scrollTo=678

Here's a new picture, today. It seems apparent that when rooting runners in soil that rooting the younger runners is more effective. The opposite might be true in water.

Just as a tip, if you root anything in water, attempting fewer cuttings per container seems to be more successful.

This thread began on our companion site: http://vegetables.boards.net/thread/237/greenhouse-seeds-planted-garden-progress

I'm growing Buckbee's New 50-day tomato, this year (2019). It has decent-sized fruits with thick walls and mild, but good, flavor. The plant is small and has an open habit (so you can see the fruit without moving leaves or branches). The plant was shaded by other plants; so there was little risk of sunscald.

The first fruit was ripe on 26 July. Here are some pictures of it.







heirloom_tomato

Apparently, my Amana Orange and Chris Ukrainian tomatoes are striped! That may explain why the Chris Ukrainian tomato had a different growth rate than the ones I gave away.

Amana Orange could be crossed with any of the following striped tomatoes that I grew in 2016: Girl Girl's Weird Thing, Purple Bumble Bee, or Pink Berkeley Tie Dye. If it's shape is dominant to Maglia Rosa's (which I don't think is the case), then Maglia Rosa is also a possibility. I think Girl Girl's Weird Thing is the most likely candidate, however, based on the look of the plant, and how GGWT seems to cross-pollinate stuff fairly often (although there was a Purple Bumble Bee plant closer). PBTD was pretty late that year, and didn't have a lot of fruit or foliage.

A Missouri Pink Love Apple cross in 2017 had stripes (I think GGWT pollinated it in 2016, too, since it looked like GGWT). However, it could have been mixed up seed instead. Edit: The seeds were from 2016; so, that's not likely. Indian Zebra (which some call Indian Stripe) is perhaps another possibility.

Here's the Amana Orange cross with stripes (the small tomatoes in the second picture are a volunteer which is probably Husky Cherry Red F-something x Sweet Orange Cherry F2; it ripens yellow):

Of all my new tomatoes, this year (2019), I'm most impressed with Marion, currently. It had good, clean germination, and a high germination rate. The plant has good vigor. It set fruit early, and the fruits are a good size. The first fruit ripened by 25 July 2019 (it's been a slow-ripening year; not all my previously grown early tomatoes have had ripe fruit, yet). The first fruit to ripen was the largest on the plant, interestingly. I saved seeds and ate the fruit. It tasted excellent! It has what I think is a Brandywine-type taste, but better than that sounds to me. Another taster really liked the taste, too. The texture was good, and the walls were pretty thick. Here are some pictures of it.

I definitely want to grow multiple Marion tomato plants next year. I'm thinking my lineup may include at least Marion, Sausage, Sweet Orange Cherry, Mountain Princess, my Brandy Boy cross, my Gnocchia di Limone cross, Galapagos Island, and some others.








Offsite articles:
• Bonnie Plants
• Cucurbit Breeding at NC State
• Dave's Garden
• Rutgers University
• Tatiana's TOMATObase

Offsite threads:
• http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=18569
• http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=40564

Vendors:
• The Home Depot
• MIgardener
• My Patriot Supply
• Pase Seeds
• Piedmont Farm and Garden Supply
• Reimer Seeds
• SeedsNow
• Sustainable Seed Company
• Totally Tomatoes
• Urban Farmer (ufseeds.com)

heirloom_tomato

So, I decided to harvest a full-grown horseradish leaf with chlorosis, today, and eat it. This is the first horseradish leaf of my my plants that I've eaten. The soil had loads of wood ash in it (so it probably needed more nitrogen and less calcium or something). The plant is getting green now, however.

Recap: Earlier this year, in the spring, I tried a friend's horseradish leaves, and they tasted like strong cabbage. The texture was kind of chewy, and the skin was thin and maybe a little stretchy. It tasted like powerful cabbage, except the stem tasted like horseradish. The only fibrous part was the stem below the leaf.

My leaf today was quite different. The whole leaf tasted kind of like horseradish. It reminded me of hot radishes, except it wasn't fibrous (except for the stem and some inches of the center vein). It had a great texture for fresh-eating (not tough or stretchy). It did have some sinus-clearing properties. It left a smell in my mouth as if I had just eaten a good sandwich. It felt healthy. So, I ate some more of it (the spiciness made this a slow process), and then I put the rest on a sandwich and ate it. The sandwich definitely masked most of the spiciness, and made eating the rest of the leaf quick work. It was good on the sandwich (which was just bread, cheese, and the leaf).

I'm not sure if my horseradish is the same sort as the kind I tried earlier in the year. The kind I ate today had western shade, and probably some southern shade, and it had black plastic around it. The other kind was in full sun, with no black plastic; it also had no chlorosis.