On the menu for this weekend: fried green tomatoes. Man, I love them. This will be my first time trying to make them myself. They sell green tomatoes at the farmer's market, so I will load up on trial specimens. I'm going to serve them up with goat cheese, and then die, as all my earthly desires will have been fulfilled.
My own two tomato plants (varieties grown by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello -- this is the kind of seriously vintage seedstock to which one has access when both of one's parents work in the burgeoning Colonial Services Industry) have yet to bloom. I did some googling, and the internet gardening hivemind agrees that a lack of sufficient sunlight (8 hours/day minimum) is the culprit here. This weekend will therefore see not only the repotting of the plants, but their removal to the roof, where they will be flame-broiled by the DC Sun-Oven until they burst forth with kajillions of globular fruits.
Then, of course, I will begin a fruitless (har-har) battle against tomato-nibbling squirrels. So far, my best anti-squirrel idea has been berry netting. The last time I grew tomatoes, neither coating the plants with Tabasco sauce nor keeping a rubber-band gun at the ready did anything to fend off squirrels. Short of a BB gun, berry-netting is probably the most likely bet, especially if I get real serious and build some kind of PVC-pipe superstructure for it. We'll see if I get that far. After all, even if the squirrels run off with my crop, they're unlikely to invade the farmer's market.
posted by Reen |link| 0 comments
