The food thread

We could talk about tomatoes. Commercially they want "breakers" these are green tomatoes that have a spot of red. No red and they will not turn red later. All red and they may rot before use. So a "breaker" can sit on the shelf until it turns all red. Of course often the fruit isn't fully ripe and of course not as sweet as a really vine ripened one.

As much as the beefsteak has become popular it was breed to be space efficient and not bruise easily.

Eating tomatoes I prefer the Roma but for a slice in sandwiches I have an name unknown local type that is round, larger than a Roma but way smaller than a beefsteak.

Next we could talk about the lettuce...
 
I took seed from shop bought tomatoes and planted them.
One plant has got a truss a foot long and all the bees have gone for the shade

60yr. ago my grandmother grew a Roma style tomato, it was sweet and tart and touching the plant made your hands have an intense pine like smell that was very hard to remove. This is all I knew as tomatoes. The other issue is that they have been selected for disease resistance, much has been lost.
 
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Last year I grew a couple dozen different heirloom tomato varieties, from seed. It wasn't even difficult. Buy the packets, watch the YouTube videos, obtain the equipment, follow the instructions. Got them up to 18 inches tall before transplanting into the final location (which, it eventually turned out, had woefully insufficient sunlight. Not the fault of the seeds).

If you spend 40 minutes on Google you can find thousands and thousands of different seeds for tomato varieties, some with pure breeding guarantees stretching back 150 years. Undoubtedly the ones that Scott Wurcer remembers are still available, all he needs to do is type in the name. "What my grandma used to have" is, regrettably, not a successful search term.

The ones you buy at the hardware store or big box home improvement store, are "hybrid" seeds. Big Boy, Better Boy, Beefsteak, Best Boy, Early Girl, etc., are non-heirloom tomatoes cross breeded and hybridized by Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland to give high yield, disease resistant, drought-tolerant, bruise resistant fruit. You may also enjoy their taste but that was not a variable which was optimized.
 
I have grown several varieties of peppers from seeds harvested from food, both dried and fresh. Many dried chilis seem to have been dried at a high temperature so the seeds don't germinate, but some do. Also many fresh peppers are harvested before the seeds are viable. I planted a bunch of poblano seeds and one sprouted, but late in the season so kept the plant indoors all winter. It is still going and bearing fruit, though not too healthy now

This year also planted "stumps" from celery and bok choy and they are growing. Last year I cut up and planted a couple of nasty looking sprouty potatoes, they about took over the garden. It was fun but a waste of garden space for a few spuds.

Oh the most fun is the spice shelf, fenugreek grows like crazy and the greens are delicious.
 
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Greenhouse is needed for [tomato] seeds. We usually buy seedlings.
Not here in California. I was able to germinate them in my garage using standard T5 grow lights and cheapo heat mats.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00T0CPI6A/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P7U259C/

The guy who wrote the book "Epic Tomatoes" has a youtube channel (search for nctomatoman) in which he shows how HE grows heirloom tomatoes from seed, in his garage in North Carolina. He does it the same way I do (actually, reverse that for greatest accuracy)

YouTube
 
I have tomatoes plants coming up from last years tomatoes that rotted into the earth. Keep a few of them going, in open areas, great to be able to get a later crop. I find the bigger plants die off fast, after the big harvest. The cherries grow like pole beans, taller than me. I am close to getting some Sweet Millions, nice and big this year.
Peppers from seeds take a longer time than tomatoes.
Time to go give them some water it is going to be hot today.

Happy gardening
 
Undoubtedly the ones that Scott Wurcer remembers are still available, all he needs to do is type in the name. "What my grandma used to have" is, regrettably, not a successful search term.

Well childhood memories are just that sometimes the memory is better than the fact. I put in a keyhole garden with some heirloom plants this year, the smaller fruit varieties are starting to be ready. I confess leaving them on the vine until fully red they're pretty much what I remember. Maybe I was more sensitive to the oils in the trichomes when I was a kid. The keyhole garden worked to well BTW, feed well with compost every thing took off like crazy.

This year also planted "stumps" from celery

I put some horseradish root right from the super market into the ground, a few month later this is the real sinus cleaner.
 
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@ Not to belabor tomato talk, Mark J. this is the kind of note I was referring to earlier. I guess there can be a gray area since even though open-pollinated the Roma is not considered heirloom while San Marzano is. The "steady improvement" to me indicates that it changes. I'm sure there are places where one can find out more than you would ever want to know about all this.

While Roma is an open-pollinated variety rather than a hybrid, it has been steadily improved to the point where most Roma tomato vines are verticillium and fusarium wilt resistant (thus the VF in the name).