The Poetics of Heirloom Tomatoes

My Sungolds, August 2008.

Now that I’ve put my winter quarter grades to bed, I finally had a chance this week to start my tomatoes, a week or two later than I’d prefer. I grow them from seed for two reasons. You can’t get most of these varieties from nurseries, and I am just endlessly fascinated by seeds. (In theory, I might also save money by starting my own, but I sort of doubt it, since I’m too obsessed with variety.)

Most of the ‘maters I grow are heirlooms, meaning they’re older varieties that will breed true without any human intervention. If I were more dedicated, and better organized, I could save the seeds, but I’m not, so I don’t. I do grow a couple of hybrids: Sweet Million cherries, Brandy Boy (which combines the flavor of Brandywine with much higher yields, but is annoyingly available only through the Burpee catalog. And of course – Sungold cherry tomatoes.

The names of tomatoes are ripe with color and flavor. I’ve got a whole series of purples: Pruden’s Purple. Marizol Purple. Eva Purple Ball. Purple Price. Cherokee Purple. They’re more pink than purple, except for Cherokee Purple, which is actually closer to the blacks, but I love the very idea of purple. I will say that the pictures of Purple Price look close to a real purple, but I managed to kill it last year in the Great Overfertilizing Disaster, so I can’t confirm its color.

I fell in love with black tomatoes last year: Black Cherry (which grows huge but wasn’t especially prolific, Chocolate Cherry (new this year), Black Krim, Carbon, and Black from Tula. They taste dusky and rich. Carbon was great for me last summer, which smacks mildly of irony, since I live at the edge of a dying coal region.

The tomato my family nearly fought over last year was Kellogg’s Breakfast Tomato. No corn flakes involved: it’s a big, juicy orange guy. I’m also planting a couple of bicolors, Big Rainbow and Isis Candy (cherry); they’re prettier than what the Tiger renamed “the Breskit Tomato” but not as flavorful. For the first time, I’m trying a bicolor version of Mortgage Lifter, so named because its original developer apparently got himself out of debt thanks to the variety’s huge fruit and prolific yield.

For some reason, tomatoes – like ships – are more likely to get feminine than masculine names. I’m planting Kimberly, Snow White, Marianna’s Peace, Aunt Gertie’s Gold, and the aforementioned Eva Purple Ball, but only two with dudely names, Andrew Rahart’s Jumbo Red and Matt’s Wild Cherry.

Then there are the names that are all over the map. Bulgarian #7 (no word on the whereabouts of 1 through 6), Galina’s (a tart yellow cherry from Siberia), Azoychka (a medium-sized yellow, also from Russia), Caspian Pink, Stupice (from then-Czechoslovakia), Nepal (from the Himalayas), and Stump of the World. I guess the Stump is where you land after all that traveling. Oh, and there’s Giant Belgium, which is apparently from … Ohio.

To round it off, I started Brandywine, Boxcar Willie, Great White, and Sioux. And did I mention Sungolds?

I do not have space for all these plants. I'll no doubt crowd too many too close, like I do every year. Today I finally finished what ought to have been the fall cleanup (and was grateful to finish the job without fatigue sideswiping me). All those dead vines reminded me that fungal disease is my enemy, air circulation is my friend. By the time I plant this year's babies out in six weeks or so, I will have forgotten that lesson.

I've still got oodles of seeds, so if you want some, let me know in comments! I would seriously send them to you. (You'd need to email me your address.) Or just show up in Athens around Mother's Day, when you'll find me disoriented, circling my garden, desperately plotting a way to squeeze in just one more plant.

Springing into Cognitive Dissonance

Am I the only one who thinks it's jarring that the first day of spring coincides with the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War? As if the war itself weren't appalling enough, the timing just seems like an affront to all that's good in the universe.

In a different register, but also distressing: Ohio's unemployment rate climbed to 9.4%, the highest in 25 years, according to figures released today.

In the face of all that, my daffodils have finally burst into bloom.

Seeds, Sentiment, Magic

Sorry to illustrate a post about seeds with a flower I grew from a bulb, but hey, this is what's blooming in my garden today. The photo shows my little rock iris.

Today I started to plant my garden. Well, that's the truth if you don't mind a little embroidery. My garden is entirely indoors, so far, and all I planted was a slew of impatiens seeds.

It's hard not to get, well, impatient while planting those little buggers. They're small. Very small. I have to take off my glasses to see them. I end up hunched over the seeds and the flats like a clumsy horticultural Mr. Magoo. And so they make me feel old. Planting tiny seeds relentlessly tracks my presbyopia from year to year. (If you clicked on that link, you're probably young enough not to worry about it yet.) One of these years I'm going to need bifocals. For now, I can get by without them, but only because I can leverage my nearsightedness, Magoo-like.

Anyway. There aren't a whole lot of smart reasons to grow impatiens from seed. They're readily available from any nursery - even Wal-Mart. It's true I want a lot of them (for my too-abundant shady beds) and I'll save a little money by starting them myself. That is the official rationale.

If I'm honest about it, though, I'll admit it's not really about economizing. Not at all. I just love seeds. And so I'll promiscuously start almost anything indoors, weeks before I can really garden outside. I keep watch on the seed coat as it softens and relents. I'm spellbound by the improbability of the seed leaf emerging from its harsh husk, sometimes after years of dormancy, wakened from sleep by the kiss of moisture. I hold my breath in fear of damping off (the plague of seedlings). I'll dab my own spit on any recalcitrant seed coat that threatens to trap the leaves, then coax out the tender greenery. So much wonder and anticipation even before the first true leaves, never mind the flower and fruit.

I'm no different from my son the Tiger, who planted beans in his kindergarten class last week. He doesn't know exactly what to expect. He just knows they're magic. And he's waiting for that magic beanstalk to emerge, leading places only he can imagine.

War of the Roses and Clematis

I have no energy to post on the stuff that's really got me thinking today - because I've become a casualty of the undeclared war of the roses and clematis.

Today was stunningly beautiful, and so our whole family trooped out to the yard to try and undo the winter's damage. Well, two of us tried; the other two, the small ones, played with household chemicals and made rockets blast off with Alka-seltzer tablets. On balance, this was probably less risky than entrusting them with pruning shears.

My mission was to save my poor diseased clematis. If you've been with me since summer, you might recall some of the pictures I posted here. Well, I have a confession: Like more conventional porn, my garden porn is cleverly cropped to hide imperfections. While I haven't stooped to airbrushing (yet!), I did conceal the fungus-ridden foliage on my clematis.

So I determined to prune them all hard (not just the jackmanii, which expects a hard pruning) and hope that what grows back will be less fungified. It took a few hours and I felt like I was performing an amputation, but I pruned my darlings back to short (4- to 6-inch) stumps, bagged up all the nasty foliage, and removed a bit of topsoil to boot. Now I'm praying to the Ceiling Cat that my plan works.

The only problem? My clematis shares space with the roses. All the garden guides will tell you that clematis and roses are excellent partners. I'm sure that the authors of said guides let their hired help do the pruning.

Because it was a bloody mess - quite literally. Even though I waited until my husband had first pruned the roses, I ended up with scratches and fragments of thorns in my arms, a deep cut in one finger (how I got that one, I can't even say), and a thorn under a thumbnail. Yes, that was as hideous as it sounds. I think I shouted some words that I usually avoid saying in front of the kids, but I really don't know, because I was seeing swirls and starbursts of yellow, orange, and red and trying not to scream a second time.

Oh, and I got a mild sunburn, too - while working in the shade, in Ohio, on the seventh day of March. I'm actually kind of tickled about this, since it really is mild and it seems just as happily anomalous as the perfect day that just ended.

I'm so grateful that I had the energy to work in my garden. I'm paying for it tonight, and I'll likely be kaput tomorrow, but it buoys my hope that I'll keep on healing. (In case you were wondering, I'm not back to "normal," though I'm continuously improving. The fatigue is the worst of my remaining symptoms.)

Since the only thing to show for my work is some black dirt and a blank trellis, here's a more photogenic alternative: an update on the crocus that popped up a week ago. It's no longer alone, so you can expect more pictures in the days ahead. If you click to embiggen the photo, you'll see the tracery of russet veins on the petals.

My First Shivering Crocus

Here's my first lonely crocus of the year. It popped up a day ago, rising above the brown and trodden grass. This morning, it refused to open in the damp grey air. It's holding out for a few more rays of sun, and I can't blame it. My daffodils, too, are sending up their first tentative shoots, but they're still nothing but hope and promise.

And then there are my ornery pansies, under ice ten days ago, now stubbornly trying to bloom. They're not a thing of beauty, are they? But that's beside the point. The point is, they're still here. They persist. Despite sub-zero temperatures.

Just because a metaphor is obvious doesn't mean it's any less true.

My Garden's Anti-Makeover

I'm a sucker for makeovers in fashion mags and for before-and-after pictures of any sort. They tap into the part of me that brims with hope, that believes in our potential for transformation. Yep, I fully realize that I'm falling prey to commodification, the beauty ideal, and pretty much every other ill of late capitalism. That still hasn't reformed me. I still experience a new haircut as a stand-in for deeper renewal.

My garden just underwent an extreme makeover. Unfortunately, these before-and-after photos go completely in the wrong direction. They're more like the fashion "don'ts" in Glamour magazine. So here's what my lavender looked like in July:


And here's how it looked on Wednesday.


I'm having a hard time believing in spring right about now. I think I need to make a leap of faith - that the air will warm, the soil will thaw, and I'll be healthy enough to dig. I think I need to pull out my seed catalogs and start planning my garden.

Persistence

It would be too easy to turn these little guys into an inspirational statement. So I won't.


They are just themselves, my tough little pansies, rearing up through the snow and ice yesterday, the 17th of December. Today the snow melted and they're still there, standing a bit taller.


I may see them as embodying persistence. You get to pick whatever metaphor works for you.

Still Life with Fruit (and Vegetables, and Bread ...)

Apart from a few woeful pansies and the Silver Tidal Wave petunias that just won't die, my flowers are now out of season. I'm bereft of fresh garden porn. But in a before-and-after sorta way, I'm almost equally inspired by food photography, which is fresh year 'round. And now, via Benjamin Cohen of Science Blogs, I've discovered that a British artist, Carl Warner, combines both genres.

But is it art?

Whatever - it's very trippy. This garlic-scape looks as though Alice and the White Rabbit ought to be skulking through it ...


... and this might be where they landed when Alice went down the rabbit-hole. Note the carrot stalactites.


This valley appears to be an edible version of Yosemite. Instead of Half Dome, maybe it's Half Loaf?


And this fruity balloonscape makes me think of the opening sequence from Ian McEwan's Enduring Love - minus the catastrophe.


All images nicked from Carl Warner's gallery at The Telegraph (UK); go there and to Warner's website for more.

The last photo is an especially striking illustration of the point Benjamin Cohen makes: that food is used to depict the growing of other food. Kind of twisted, and kind of cool.

Garden Timing: Snow Easy Feat

I love my garden. I love digging in the dirt. And yet I'm a terrible gardener when it comes to timing. I can never get it right.


So this afternoon found me digging through snow in front of the house, frantically trying to plant a slew of tulip and daffodil bulbs before the ground freezes solid.


Sure, there are reasons for my bad timing. I had to get Obama elected (singlehandedly!!), then had to wait until my back felt better, then had to finish the end-of-term grading. Even today, I was rushing rushing rushing before the sun went down and my assistant (the Tiger) lost patience - both of which, predictably, happened toward the end.


And yet, I got 200 bulbs in the ground. Not well. Not deep. But they're in. Tomorrow, more snow is supposed to fall.

I'm pretty sure that's an unsubtle metaphor for how I manage my life.


And now we wait and hope for a reprise of last spring's glory.

All photos courtesy of my garden porn collection. Today's bulbs went into new beds; I'm hoping that these tulips - photographed in April 2008 in front of my house - might return for a third year.

The Big Chill

We're due for our first hard frost tonight. Maybe my mini-ecosystem will be spared; sometimes it seems to be blessed by a merciful god, graced with warm soils and mild air pockets. Other times - not so much. So this afternoon, in the blinding October sunlight, I went out to the garden and gathered in everything tender.

Yes, that's an eggplant, barely larger than my cherry tomatoes. I've always had horrible luck growing eggplant. I keep trying, anyway, just for the idea of it. I suspect that reveals something about my character that really ought to stay hidden. It's not unlike the dog who's sure he'll get the better of the skunk, this time.

The butternut squash are also miniatures, and not by design. They're the sole survivors of marauding squash bugs and vine borers and spotted cucumber beetles. (The last of these have moved on to our roses, the little bastards.)

I actually love the first weeks of fall more than just about any other season. I love the advent of a new school year, the sense of possibility and beginning again. (Maybe that's why I've never really been out of school since I was five?) I love the turning leaves and the sharp edge to the morning air.

But now the season is about to twist on its axis, making the decline of Eden evident and inevitable. This is the bookend to the golds of spring, the fulfillment of the Robert Frost poem I quoted here last spring while the daffodils held sway:

Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

In the morning, I'll tally up my losses. Tonight, I've still got this, the summer's final bounty.

Meet the New Prof - Same as the Old Prof

Except not entirely. Today was my first day teaching as an "assistant visiting professor." Never mind the "visiting" part of it; I still felt a lot less tenuous than I did as an adjunct. I know what I'm doing through early June, and that feels wonderful.

I also seem to have a wonderful group of students in my feminist theory class. It's a small group, and they seem curious, lively, and glad to be there. Funny thing - that's how I felt about it, too.

Soon enough, I'll be grading papers and exams, and I'll be a little less jubilant. For now, I just want to celebrate. There's time enough for politics again tomorrow. (Well, okay, we talked about Palin in class today, but that, too, can wait.)

Reaping What I Sowed

Back in June, about a month later than optimal, I planted something like 30 tomato starts in my garden. I'd grown them from seed - mostly heirloom varieties, with a couple of hybrid cherries - but neglected to plant them on time because I got too busy. (I'm a passionate gardener, but my ambition always outstrips my organization.) They were spindly and purple-yellowed by the time I put them in the ground; if they'd been Christmas trees, Charlie Brown would have taken them home. Before we started our summer travels, I put down newspapers as a weed barrier, my husband caged them, and we mulched them with straw.

Here's those runty little plants, ten weeks later:


The bed in the next photo has traditionally been a lost cause because its inhabitants compete with the silver maple's thirsty roots. But these maters aren't just holding their own, they seem to think they're performing a solanaceous version of Jack and the Beanstalk.


Unsurprisingly, given how late I was in planting them out, my cherry tomatoes are doing the best. They're so rampant that they'll probably be one big mass of disease before long, but for now, they're a jungle of delights.


And here's my namesake, the Sungold cherries. As you might expect, they're juicy and delicious.


I've also got oodles of Snow White, Galinas, Black Cherry, and Sweet Million cherries. Even the Sweet Millions, which are little red guys similar to what you can buy in the stores, have an uncommonly sweet and complex flavor this year. We've picked about three-quarters of a gallon in the past 24 hours - and eaten them all. The big guys are mostly still ripening, but I did carve up a Cherokee Purple for lunch.

Never mind manna. To heck with ambrosia. Tomatoes - juicy, tangy-sweet, and warm from the sun - are the favored foods of the gods.

Up in the Air

I'm about to leave hot, smoky California, so I may miss a day before posting again. (How hot? The air conditioning can't keep up with it. Ohio's surplus of thunderstorms is sounding wonderfully refreshing.)

In the meantime, here's an out-of-season picture from my garden. I guess I'm indulging in wishful thinking about temperatures cool enough to please my fragrant hyacinth.

Flakiness Alert

My little globetrotter self is off on another trip, this time just for fun. I'll be visiting family in Northern California for the next two weeks. I'll try to post when I can; I still have lots to say about all the thoughts swirling in my head after my last conference. But if I go a day or two without posts, just know it's because my mom's house is equipped with a dialup connection of the sort we all enjoyed back in 1999.

In the meantime, enjoy my giant allium, which finished blooming a couple of weeks ago already.

Tuesday Recipe: Bright Lights Chard with Raisins and Pine Nuts

This is an adapted recipe that comes from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. The original used spinach. The pictures below are all mine.

First, sometime in April, you plant Bright Lights chard seeds about a half-inch deep in a bed tilled with lots of compost and manure. Chard is easy to grow - except for last season, when I thought rabbits were eating it but was puzzled at why bunnies would systematically eat only the large leaves and leave a smooth edge where the stem began. It turned out a homeless person was living in a nearby empty house. That's why the "bunny" was so clever.

Anyway, a couple of weeks after germination, you thin it to about a six-inch spacing in every direction because chard is a beet relative and sprouts more than one plant per seed. You feed it organically, which here just meant leaving it alone because the bed was rich. You keep it watered until its tap roots are well established. It probably doesn't hurt to just generally love on it and tell it that it's beautiful.

And then, about six weeks after planting, it looks like this:


You'll notice the jungle features lots of volunteer clover, left to flourish while I do battle with the crab grass at the back of the bed. It'll grow larger and last until the very end of the season. Unlike spinach, chard won't bolt or turn bitter in the heat. I've had it survive until nearly Christmas. Since it's biennial, it will come back in the spring if we get even a slightly merciful winter.


Up close, you can see some of the color variations. For some reasons, red is predominating in my patch, though I do have some yellow, white, and pink.


When you're ready to start cooking, you cut off just the big outer leaves with a sharp paring knife so you can harvest more later. You wash them, enjoying the absence of aphids, leafminers, or other pests - so far I've been lucky this year.

Here's the chard displaying its finery before cooking fades it:


And here's what all you'll need to finish the job:

About 2 pounds of chard (you can sometimes buy Bright Lights at the grocery store, but any chard will do)
3 T. raisins (I use a bit more)
3 T. pine nuts (I use a lot more)
3 garlic cloves, sliced thinly (I usually quarter them first)
1/4 cup olive oil (I use less)

I put the pine nuts in the oven at 400 degrees to roast for about 5 minutes; you could also sauté them with the garlic in some olive oil in a non-stick pan (I use a wok). Either way, you want both to be golden. While doing this, I let the stems of the chard boil or steam for a few minutes until tender and let the raisins plump up in hot water. Once the garlic is light gold, the chard leaves can be added. Stir them on medium-high until they're wilted to your satisfaction. Add everything else, including salt and pepper to taste, and give it a few more stirs. Add more olive oil if desired (I didn't).

And here's what you've got. Yum! I used to make this a lot during the 1990s, before kids, while I was still living in Berlin and white chard (Mangold) was ubiquitous. Last night, even the Bear enjoyed it, and I wondered why I ever stopped making it regularly.

Floral Antidote to Sordid Scandals

I’m not so daft as to think that a smattering of beauty really fixes anything that’s wrong with the world. And yet – one perfect tulip is a lovely antidote to the ugliness that seems to be dominating the news.


Talk about self-luminous.

From my garden in front of my house.

Self-Luminous

This week in the religion, gender, and sexuality class I'm helping teach, we read an account of the Buddhist creation myth. One of the fun things about teaching is having a chance to learn about stuff that is completely new to me. At least in the humanities and social sciences, I think this is virtually always true, even if you're teaching in your own research field. But it's even truer when half the course is really outside your area of expertise. So this Buddhist origin story, the Agganna Sutta, was all new to me.

And since I'm so not an expert on it, I mostly just want to offer a modest appreciation of its beauty.

There comes a time . . . when sooner or later this world begins to re-evolve. When this happens, beings who had deceased from the World of Radiance, usually come to life as humans. And they become made of mind, feeding on rapture, self-luminous, traversing the air, continuing in glory, and remain thus for a long, long period of time.
(This is from the version I read for class. Here's the whole Agganna Sutta but in a slightly less beautiful translation.)

Such gorgeous language. Feeding on rapture! Self-luminous! Imagine such an existence.


The catch is that if you've got self-luminance, you don't get to have a body. Later on, as the earth solidifies from liquid to a sweet milky substance to plants (a nifty evolution story), the formerly radiant beings grow more solid. As they solidify, they come to know cravings. And so, although there's no Eve to take the fall for the Fall in this story, sex becomes a polluting force. (Buddhism has its own issues with women and the flesh, as it turns out.)

But even so. I would like to be self-luminous and traverse the air for just an hour, as long as I didn't have to stay in the World of Radiance. The funny thing is, I feel like I have my share of radiance in my own little earth-bound life with all its cravings, desires, and beauty.


The petite red tulips come from the Bear's elementary school; the others, from my garden. All photos by me.

So Why Is "Pansy" an Insult?

As my dear regular readers know, I have two young sons. I teach women's and gender studies, so I might spend more time than the average parent contemplating how they're affected by prevailing ideas about masculinity. I try to let them unfold as they are meant to be, without a personal or political agenda. I teach them to use words, not blows, to settle differences (even if the words get loud sometimes). I want them to grow into kind and generous people with a reasonable share of happiness.

And yet, in some cowardly corner of my heart, I fear the day when one of them is called a sissy - or a pansy - if he refuses to swing a punch.

It's silly, isn't it? Because when you think about it, pansies aren't weak; they're not even the opposite of the most conventional notion of masculinity.

They can be subtly handsome.


They can strut an assertive, spunky personality.


They can be contemplative and subtle.


They can be blindingly bright.


And they can be tough, persistent survivors. This whole lot made it through an Ohio winter that gave us eleven (11!) snow days. (Granted, most of those were pretty bogus; I think the pansies survived them more unscathed than I.)


Which of these things should I not hope my sons will become?

Pansies and photos are mine - lucky me!

Ephemeral Gold

Since I need to be working on my infernal overdue article, and since I want to be mucking around in my garden, I'm not going to say much today. Instead, I'll defer to Robert Frost, who I think might've had my little garden in mind when he wrote this, one of my favorite poems: "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.


Her early leaf's a flower


But only so an hour.


Then leaf subsides to leaf.


So Eden sank to grief,


So dawn goes down to day.


Nothing gold can stay.

And yeah, I realize that's an awfully melancholy sentiment on a mild spring day awash in unfamiliar brilliant sunshine. Yet this poem has been running through my head all day as I've biked past trees that are just leafing out green-gold, the very newness of their buds whispering a story older than Eden of transience, loss, and rebirth.

All photos are from my garden, taken a few days ago.