Radishrain

I visited some people on Tuesday, and they gave me some Tristar strawberries so I could plant them. I planted them on Wednesday (31 July) night, each strawberry in its own foam cup. There were four strawberries. I zapped the strawberries first (I hadn't zapped the Ozark Beauty or Quinault strawberries, though). They fermented in a plastic bag a bit before I zapped them.

I got some ripe Matt's Wild Cherry tomatoes, today, and saved seeds from nine of them. They had a less strong tomatine-type taste than the ones I first tried, and they tasted decently good. Some of them split after I harvested them. They weren't super sweet, although they probably had sweetness. The plant grows long vines with long internodes. It has a lot of vine for the number of fruits, but it probably doesn't smother other plants easily, due to not being bushy.




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Here's a volunteer tomato. I believe it's Husky Cherry Red F-something x Sweet Orange Cherry F2. It resembles the F1 last year. However, it doesn't have quite the vigor and production as last year's. The taste is mild. I picked some others on Tuesday. The bigger one here isn't fully ripe, but the plant usually has the bigger size. The less ripe one had a peachy taste and a crunchy texture, kind of like a less ripe Sweet Ozark Orange.




other_tomato

Sausage was a favorite last year for production and ease of harvest/use, and for tolerating hot soil. This year, it's a lot meatier! The flavor was good (not the best for the variety, but it was the first fruit, and I preferred it to last year's first fruit), but it was a bit mushy. The pictured fruit was ripe at least a day or two ago. It's from a plant grown from seeds I saved myself.






heirloom_tomato

I had ripe Jerusalem tomatoes, today: a small one (riper) and a big one.  I liked the taste of the bigger, less ripe one more. The flavor didn't wow me, but I plan to grow it again. The plant was showing some mild disease symptoms: That may have impacted the flavor.


Small one:

Big one:



heirloom_tomato

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).

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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.