Gardening: Heirloom Tomatoes vs. Regular Tomatoes*

Hello, Gardeners!

Today, I'm going to explain some stuff about heirloom tomatoes and regular tomatoes. As I've not gardened a ton in my life, this is a more basic overview, so if you want specific information, you can look that up separately. Also, if you are planning on planting a specific type of tomato, RESEARCH THAT  INDIVIDUAL TOMATO FIRST. Do NOT rely on this post for specific information.

Now, on to tomatoes.

Heirloom Tomatoes:

Pros:
Heirloom tomatoes are older tomato varieties. They have been around for a long time, and have not been changed by genetic engineering, or science. These tomatoes often have superior flavor, and you can trace their origins. Also, it's easier to find organic seeds of heirloom tomatoes.

Cons:
Heirloom tomatoes, because they aren't changed to resist genetic disorders or pests, are more prone to genetic issues or pests. They also are more fragile because they have not been "toughened up" by humans.





Regular Tomatoes:

Pros:
Regular tomatoes are easier to take care of because of science. Basically, many regular tomatoes are bred and engineered to be more resistant to genetic disorders and pests.

Cons:
Regular tomatoes often don't have as good of a taste, but any homegrown tomato is going to taste ten times better than grocery store tomatoes. :) Also, it's harder to find organic seeds, and if the regular tomato is labeled "hybrid," you can't harvest the seeds to replant next year.

I hope you found this helpful!

Spruce Nogard

*Post actually written on June 25th. See here for details.

Gardening: The Cycle. . . Does Not Begin Again

Hello, Gardeners.

Unfortunately for me this year, I will not be able to garden. Thankfully, this is due to a wonderful opportunity I am blessed to have, but it will be a little sad not to garden.

Herbs

Beans (Some herbs on left side), Also where I had my garlic

Tomatoes

Usually, right now, I would have started seeds, hoping for my little baby tomatoes and cucumbers and beans to grow big and strong and healthy.

Instead, however, I am enjoying the unusually warm weather, and beginning to smell spring in the air.

What are your favorite parts about spring?

Spruce Nogard

Gardening: Nifty Trick: Blossom End Rot and Epsom Salt

Hello, Friends!

If you are looking on most people's bright side, it is almost spring! (Or you can pretend it is.) I actually get kind of sad around spring. I wish it was winter, with the crisp air, snow, and. . . well, I'm not exactly sure why.

Back to today's topic, though: Epsom Salt.

Have you ever heard of blossom end rot? It happens to a few plants, but the one I've had experience with is tomatoes.

Blossom end rot is when the blossom end of a tomato turns black and mushy, which can be a result of magnesium or calcium deficiency, according to sfgate.com. Thankfully, however, blossom end rot is not caused by pests. Yay!

An easy fix to blossom end rot is by applying Epsom Salts. (The kind you use for feet baths, etc.)

Just apply one tablespoon around the base of the plant when it first appears, or if you know your soil is lacking these nutrients, and maybe once more if needed. And that's it!

Do be careful, though, because Epsom salt can leak into water sources, so don't use too much of it, or use it for a long time.

Sorry, I couldn't find pictures of tomatoes with blossom end rot or Epsom salts for free, and I don't know where my pictures (if I took any) are.

Source: http://homeguides.sfgate.com/epsom-salt-tomato-plant-blossom-rot-58658.html

Gardening: We All Learn

Good Day, Gardeners.

First, just to make it clear, you all know I'm a bit peculiar, right? Good.

Our post today is about how gardeners have to have a balanced relationship with their plants. Am I personifying plants a little? That depends on your perspective. Is that a not normal thing to do? Yes. But, you don't mind, do you? After all, you are reading my blog. :)

As you can (or can't--I'll be adding pictures soon) see, I brought in all my tomatoes from out-of-doors today. They are organized into three categories: Amana Orange tomatoes, German Striped Tomatoes and tomatoes that need to be either cut up right away or watched carefully. Altogether, there are [#].

Now, unfortunately, I was unable to get pictures before dark tonight, so I am unable to show you pictures of my gardens. They look really dead, neglected, and forlorn at this point.

My cucumbers got blight, and my squash didn't produce any squash--for that matter, they didn't produce any female flowers. Besides once when I was little, whenever I've tried to grow squash, I haven't gotten any. Anyways, later, it got powdery mildew. It's a little sad.

Both the cucumbers and squash died.

My herbs are still doing wonderfully, and although I did not get as many tomatoes as last year, I still got a fair number.

(You may be wondering where the plant personification is. Don't worry. It's coming.)

The title of this post is "We All Learn." So, what does this have to do with learning?

As gardeners, we must learn from our mistakes. This year, I learned I did not balance my trust the plants can grow up, survive and live happy and healthy lives alone with their need for some Tender Loving Care. I know the plants can survive without human intervention, but do they have the best quality of life that way? I don't believe so. I neglected watering them, which led to an inconsistent amount of water intake, causing splitting/cracking. As long as you make sure to cut around the cracks and make sure the tomato isn't infected, they should be fine to eat, but don't take my word for it. :)

Remember, though, it doesn't mean you're a terrible gardener if you did neglect your plants. :) Everyone makes mistakes. Plus, it's good not to be too concerned about them, because plants do get sick, die, and have other problems, which we don't want you to stress a ton about.

Another thing I did is I got heirloom seeds. The main reason I did this is because it's much easier to find organic, non-gmo heirloom seeds than regular tomato seeds. (I'll talk about why I use all-organic everything in another post.) I had no clue heirloom and regular seeds were any different. However, heirloom tomatoes are older, so they aren't specifically bred to resist disease, or have few birth defects, like today's tomatoes are. By the way, if you want to grow heirloom tomatoes, I'm not saying you shouldn't. They taste absolutely amazing. However, if you are a first-time gardener, it would be easier for you to do regular tomatoes; in other words, tomatoes not labeled as "heirloom."

Heirloom tomatoes need more TLC than regular tomatoes, but, your whole garden needs tons of TLC anyways. Weed, pick veggies, and research out-of-the-ordinary occurrences regularly. I also did not do this consistently. :)

But, however your garden turned out, be happy with it!

And, show your plants how much you love them by rocking your tomatoes back and forth like babies!

Spruce Nogard

Gardening: Coming Toward the End

Hello, Gardeners.

Sorry this post is up late.

I live in Minnesota, so Autumn is starting to come. This means my gardens are starting to die. That's fine, though.

(If your wondering how I'm going to write about gardening without gardens, come back in two months. :) )

I'll probably have a few more things coming in over the next few weeks, so I'll give grand totals next month.

These are just totals so far:

3 cucumbers. They were in a lot of shade, so that makes sense.

My zucchini didn't have any fruit, for whatever reason.

8 garlic bulbs

41 carrots of various sizes

109 green beans

15 Amana Orange Tomatoes

13 German Striped Tomatoes

3 Cherokee Purple Tomatoes

Herbs!!!!!!

I will put pictures up as soon as I can. I can't really right now. :)

How are your gardens doing? Post below!

Spruce Nogard

Gardening: Types of Gardeners

Greetings, Friends!

Today, I have wonderful news about my plants! They are flourishing! I have had 18 beans and two cucumbers so far. However, no tomatoes yet. Apparently, they are ginormous varieties, so it makes sense they haven't ripened yet.

I was planning to just give you a quick update on my plants, but then I got to thinking about the types of gardeners. There are three main types: the Perfect Gardener, the Careless Gardener, and the Happy Gardener.

1) The Perfect Gardener

The Perfect Gardener wants their garden to be perfect. Not just to look nice, but to look absolutely spotless. The minute it isn't perfect, they freak out, and try to make everything perfect again.

2) The Careless Gardener

The Careless Gardener plants their garden, and promptly forgets about it. These gardeners's plants usually end up dying.

3) The Happy Gardener

The Happy Gardener cares for their plants, and wants them to flourish and grow, but does not freak out if their garden is not absolutely perfect. However, they may get very worried if their garden is not doing well. :) Although this gardener aspires for their garden to be beautiful, they do not force it to become beautiful.

I am mostly the Happy Gardener. Sometimes, however, I know I am closer to the Perfect Gardener, because I stress out about the tiniest things in my garden. Usually, however, if I look them up, I find out what's normal and how to dispose of the non-normal things. About the types of gardeners, though, I feel like we all are gardeners, whether we grow plants or not. See, we are all gardeners in the giant garden of Life, and we all garden differently. I believe in life, though, there are more types of gardeners. :)

What type of gardener are you?

Spruce Nogard

Gardening: The Easy Way

Greetings, Gardeners and non-Gardeners alike!

Gardening seems to have more parallels to life every time I write a post. Maybe I should rename the "Gardening" section of my blog to "Life Lessons With Plants."

Anyways, in gardening, it is often tempting to take the easy way. You see the wonderful, giant tomato plants at the store, or even the four-inch tall ones and think: I love gardening, and that would be so nice, and they'd do so much better than if I started my own seeds indoors. . . 

But would they do better? Just like in life, how the "short cut" or the "easy way" seems like it would reap many more benefits and be so much faster, in the long run, it often isn't. Usually, taking the time to go the long route proves to have more benefits. For example, in

baking, if you get the box of cake mix, it tastes nice, but a cake made from scratch tastes way better.

Tomatoes work the same way. The plants from the store often are thin and weak. Tomatoes started

Tomato From Store-Circled

From Store: Bushy-- But many thin branches

from seed indoors often grow much stronger central branches, and become large, healthy, bushes, whereas the ones from the store tend to not grow nearly as well. At least, in my experience. :) I have heard some people not get good plants from starting seeds indoors without grow lights and heating mats, which are really expensive, but mine do just fine without either.

Take my plants for example. I bet my two front tomatoes will be about the same size as my tomato plants last year, but here is the tomato I got from the store.

Also planted from seed, but smaller

Planted from seed

 

















So, what decision will you make?

Spruce Nogard

Gardening: Small Start

Wonderful Weather, my Fine Friends!

Today, we will take another glimpse at my gardens, and if you want, you can share yours in the comments.

It is only the beginning of June, so where I live, plants are just getting started. I prefer to start my plants from seed, for various reasons. I'll have to write about that some other time. However, I do make exceptions, as most of my herbs I got as plants from the store.

My veggies, (particularly my tomatoes), so far, are very small. This is perfectly fine with me, however. As you can see, my tomatoes are two to three inches tall and look like they will never grow. They are off to a small start.

My tomatoes in proportion to the rest of the bed (circled)

(By the way the chicken wire is to keep animals out of my gardens.)

Like many things in life, when things start small, it's hard to trust that they will grow, becoming something bigger and better. Last year, when I first started gardening, my tomatoes started off the same size as the ones this year. It would have been easy for me to give up. After all, how could something that small ever produce something as big as a tomato?

Last year, though, we had about 400 tomatoes from five tomato plants. I started them all from seed.

Last Year's Tomatoes--in the same size bed

By the way, this picture was taken about half- to three quarters-of the way through the summer--the plants don't have any red tomatoes yet, but if you look closely, you can see very big green ones.

Anyways. . .

In today's age, we want to be able to predict everything. We order things online, asking: When will my sister's present arrive? When will my new book get here? And we get answers. Fourteen days. Five days. If you become a member, two days.

We plan everything, from what we're doing this summer to what we eat. But some things can't be planned. They're not predictable. They don't follow a pattern. Those things, though, are just as important in our lives.

So, how do you know the barely three-inch seedlings that haven't grown for two weeks will survive?

You don't.

Sometimes, you just have to trust.

Spruce Nogard

Recipes: Fancy Salads

Greetings to all my Friends!

For a wonderful, time consuming, aesthetically pleasing, salad, read on! Even if you would never make these, they are very pretty to look at, so you might want to skim this post anyway.

The salad is based on a salad we made in a cooking class I had last year. We had four types of lettuce, peeled cucumbers and rolled the peels into tiny swirls, and so much more. The cucumber roles alone took me 2 entire episodes of "My Cat from Hell," a TV show with a cat whisperer who goes around retraining cats, and their owners, as he likes to point out. They are each 45 minutes long.

It's hard to see, but in the middle is a rose made out of a tomato peel. Around the edges are apples and oranges (blood oranges look the prettiest). We also have strawberries, cheese, cucumber peels, and radish-mushrooms in the salad.

This one has a strawberry rose in the middle.

Recipe:

There is no set recipe for this. All you need is a few salad ingredients. I can, however, tell you how to make the food art.

Tomato Roses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkHYOvwtFss
Blood Orange "Suns"

First, peel the orange as if you were peeling a small orange. Do not cut it.

Then, with one orange wedge, carefully cut it in half the long way, starting with the wide side. Do not cut it all the way through.

Then, open it up.

This is also hard to put in words with no pictures. Sorry! If you don't get it, leave a comment and ask about it. I'll try to find some pictures/diagrams for you.

Radish Mushrooms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-exJ3rF4Dw

Have food fun, Friends!

Spruce Nogard

Gardening: Almost Time to Plant!

Hello, Gnomes.

Today is the first gardening post. Here are pictures of my indoor seedlings. I have garlic and onions outside already.

 I am planting two types of tomatoes: Amana Orange and Cherokee Purple. I haven't done them before, so I will see how it goes!

I also planted cucumbers (not shown) and some herbs.

What have you done/What are you going to do for gardening? Do you all like gardening?

Happy seedling transporting, Friends!

Spruce Nogard