Green Wizardries, Tomatoes by Maxine Rogers

We are having a big harvest of tomatoes this year.  One thing the recent years of volatile weather has taught me is that not every year will be a good one for tomatoes.  I used to think we needed enough tomatoes to get from one harvest to another but I have come to see it is much better to have two, or even three, years of tomatoes put up.  

There is a formula common among people who have to drive in large deserts that they need to take along enough water for several days of being stuck for each member of their party and an equal amount for any poor, unprepared people they might come across who are stuck in the desert with no water.  

We also never know if we will need to be feeding extra people so we might as well have lots of food put by.  I mean, what would you do if some relatives or friends needed to come stay with you for a while?  

So, there you have it, two good reasons to have a large, well-stocked pantry.  It also looks as if we are headed into another Covid panic and may be facing lockdowns and the supply shortages associated with disrupting the economy in this way.  

This year, I tried a new to me Roma tomato, Italian Stallion.  I got the seeds from Dan Jason and the plants are markedly more hardy and vigorous than the La Roma hybrids I got from West Coast Seeds and they are also more productive with very large, tasty fruit.  

I tried another interesting, new to me Roma, called Orange Icicle.  I was given some seedlings from a friend and her plants were also very vigorous.  The Orange Icicle is originally from the Ukraine as are all the icicle tomatoes.  It is open pollinated and indeterminate which means it can grow to be six feet tall.   They are called icicles because they are a Roma type but skinnier than other Romas.  

My husband didn’t like the colour at first as he wasn’t sure when they were ripe but they turn a deep orange colour when fully ripe and have a tangy flavour so they are a pleasant addition to soups, salads and salsas.  

Every year, I trial a new cherry tomato or two as I hate buying tomato seeds and want to find an alternative to Sungold hybrid cherry tomatoes which taste so delicious.  Hybrid seeds do not come true if you save them where open pollinated seeds do breed true.  I bought Pink Bumble Bee cherry tomato seeds from West Coast Seeds and they are very pretty being of a light red colour with yellow stripes.  They are a large cherry tomato and tasty but not as tasty as the Sungolds.  I also tried a purple cherry tomato but am less impressed with its flavour.  The colour is also not as appealing as I had hoped.  

To collect tomato seed for next year for you and your friends and family, make sure you are only working with open-pollinated varieties.  Let the fruit ripen fully or even over ripen.  Cut open the fruit and harvest the seeds.  The seeds will be covered in a sort of jell.  This jell is a sprout inhibitor and needs to be cleaned off.

To clean the seeds, put them into a glass jar and add some water.  Leave this jar uncovered on a windowsill until it gets mouldy.  The mould will digest the jell off the seeds and leave the seeds clean and undamaged.  Pour the mould off the top of the jar and any seeds that are floating on top.  These seeds will be infertile.  The good seeds are heavier and will be at the bottom of the jar.  Strain and wash these seeds and put them to dry on a plate with a label on it.  All tomato seeds look pretty much alike so you really do want to label.  This process leaves you with clean, fuzzy tomato seeds that are easy to work with.  Fresh tomato seed has great germination rates, as in every seed you plant come up so that is a good reason to save tomato seeds.  

To preserve tomatoes, I use the water-bath canning method and have done so for a very long time.  Some people say tomatoes should be processed in a pressure canner but I don’t see why as the water-bath canner does a good job and you can put batch after batch in the water-bath canner making it faster than trying to use a pressure canner.  

We also dry a lot of cherry tomatoes in a dehydrator and these make a wonderful addition to winter salads and salsa.   They are also a tasty snack on their own and I never need to worry about what to give my niece, Rachel, for Saturnalia as she just loves dehydrated tomatoes.  

Green Wizardries, The Peach Harvest by Maxine Rogers

Denman and Hornby are not know for their lavish peach harvests but this could change.  I thought it was too cold and too wet to cultivate peaches here but my husband was determined to try.  He pointed out that several people on Denman have successful peach trees.  All the successful peach trees were under cover in a greenhouse or tucked up against a wall with a roof overhang protecting them from the rain.  

One woman had a peach tree that was partly under the greenhouse but some branches strayed into the open.  The protected branches looked fine and had lovely fruit on them.  The unprotected branches looked as if they had leprosy, they were so badly affected by peach-leaf curl.  This provided an object lesson in the importance of overhead protection for peaches.  

Now, some peaches are resistant to peach-leaf curl but resistance is not immunity.  I suspect resistance will not help you much in a cold, wet year.  That said, a friend on Hornby has a peach-leaf curl resistant tree on her farm and it did very well this year but this has been a very dry year.  

So, my husband had a peach house built backing on to a building with a pretty good southern exposure.  The roof is made from transparent panels of some sort of plastic and they are surprisingly expensive.  However, they are quite sturdy and will last a long time.  

I saw a nurseryman in Victoria who had built a house of studs with a peaked roof in his backyard and then covered the studs inside and out with the sort of plastic vapour barrier used in house construction.  His nursery in this very inexpensive greenhouse was very productive so you could try that.  

Our peach house is 10 feet wide and 14 feet long.  We have two Frost peaches in there that we bought from Beulah Creek Nursery in 2020.   

The first year, we removed all but a handful of the developing fruit to let the trees get established.  The second year, we had a small but tasty harvest.  This year, we got 55.5 pounds of peaches from our two little trees.  

You may well ask, how did we keep the raccoons and birds from harvesting the peaches for us?   We covered the building in the smallest gauge of chicken wire to prevent any wildlife getting in to sample our precious fruit. It has a door made of a wooden frame, covered with chicken wire.  It is very sturdily built as peach trees should live a long time.  

One problem with Frost peaches is that they bloom even before the cherry trees.  Their blooms are a beautiful, rich pink but when they come out, no pollinators are flying.  It is just too cold.  So, each spring, I get a small ladder and a watercolour brush and spend a few hours over a couple of days, sitting on the ladder going from bloom to bloom pollinating them myself.  I suspect other varieties of peach might bloom later and this might be something you want to take into account when purchasing peach trees.

You can grow peach trees from pits but this is sexual reproduction and the tree you get will be unique.  It may or may not have nice fruit and a peach grown this way will get to be 20 feet tall or so.  That is a lot of tree to try and keep under cover.  Semi dwarf peach trees will grow 12 to 15 feet tall and up to 15 feet wide so dwarf trees might be easier to manage.  Dwarf peaches only grow 8 to 10 feet tall.  

Friends who have their peaches in greenhouses do very well and their peaches ripen earlier than ours.  Our house can be adapted to become a greenhouse.  This winter, I propose to built frames of light wood to fit the dimensions of the peach house walls.  I will staple polyethylene sheets to the frames and then temporarily attach them  to the peach house walls to ensure greater heat which peaches love.  If we get another bad heat wave, I can take the panels off.  

Using this form of cultivation, I believe it will be possible to grow nectarines and apricots too.  Of course, you have to arrange for irrigation as the trees are totally protected from rain.  I water our trees from a rain barrel with a hose under gravity feed.  This takes a long time and gives me the time I need to recite some of the longer prayers I work with.  

The trees also need to be fed.  We covered all the weeds and grass on the floor of the peach house with heavy paper feed bags.  We covered the bags with animal manure and hay from the barns.  All of this mulch gets watered to provide the food the trees need.  The trees are flourishing.  I have done the same thing around the apple, pear and plum trees outside and they are benefiting from the extra feed.  

The only problem with peaches cultivated in this way is that they ripen long before the Blackberry Fair and Hornby Island’s Fall Fair.