Red Toch Garlic

16 August 200712 December 2018

I’ve been slowly working my way through the garlic I’ve harvested over the last month or so. I’m not going to make separate posts of all the garlic I grew, but I thought I would point out what I think are some of the more interesting ones.

It’s my habit not to clean the bulbs until they have cured, so while many other people have been posting pictures of their cleaned garlic, I haven’t had any to take pictures of until now. I find if I clean harvested garlic with water, it risks making the bulb wetter and the curing process more difficult.

My garlic was wet enough this year when it came out of the ground! It was a very wet year here. About 1 in 20 bulbs formed single cloves, and many fell victim to rotting or mildew. Not a great year for growing garlic!

Anyway, Red Toch is a variety from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Toch is short for Tochliavri, the name of a city. Many really outstanding garlics come from Georgia!

The Seed Savers Exchange reports this is the most commonly requested variety by it’s members.

I like this variety very much, and it grows very well in my garden. It is a good all purpose garlic. The one major drawback is it has one of the shortest storage life of all the varieties I grow, so I have to make sure I eat it first.

The bulb on the right began to open in the ground, exposing the cloves.

16 August 200712 December 2018

Tomato Pictures

I feel very far behind in posting pictures of what I have growing. Here are a few tomato pictures.

Red Pear Tomato

Above is the Red Pear tomato Ashleigh gave to me.

It’s a cute little plant, and the tomatoes are nice. The plant is not very prolific, and the foliage is amazing susceptible to diseases like powdery mildew and early blight. My plant hardly has any leaves left, because I’ve had to remove them all.

Currant Tomatoes

These are currant (also called wild) tomatoes. I am growing two kinds that look exactly the same, Sugar Cherry Currant and Matt’s Wild Cherry. The former is more prolific and the latter has a better flavor and more compact plant.

I have been growing currant tomatoes for a while because they have some blight resistance. It means when my tomatoes get blight, these plants will last longer and continue to bear fruit, meaning I can still have some tomatoes when the other plants have died.

It turns out here are two problems with this logic. The first is even though the plants don’t die right away, they remain infected and spread blight spores. The other thing is, when all is said and done, currant tomatoes aren’t very exciting. They are small and very sweet. I like them, and will probably keep growing them, but if all my other tomatoes die and all I’m left with are currant tomatoes, it’s a bit of a disappointing year.

Finally, here is a picture of an F2 generation cross (Whippersnapper x Ida Gold) I got from my friend Lieven. F2’s are genetically unstable. I grew 3 plants and they are all a bit different:

Lieven's F2

The parent plants are red and gold. Above you can see the first is red and the second is yellow. The third one is also red, but is has some problems ripening. The third plant is obviously a little genetically defective. Some of the tomatoes on the third plant also develop unripe white spots, even though the rest of the tomato is red. Eventually the fruits on the third plants ripen fully to red.

One parent is determinate and the other is indeterminate. Of my three, one seems to be mostly determinate and the other 2 indeterminate.

All of the plants are very small and compact. The first two taste better than the third, but in fact they all taste really good!

6 August 2007

More CCD and Bee Rumors

The Daily Green has published another article with an explanation of the causes and reasons for Colony Collapse Disorder.

This seems to confirm what I posted about a few weeks ago, and was announced by Spanish scientists. Now all that’s left to do is wait for the ‘official’ announcement from US scientists confirming they have discovered the cause in US bees.

The Daily Green article is interesting in that it goes a bit further and explains the underlying greed that caused the problem in the first place.

The good news in all of this is if the underlying problem has been discovered, it may be possible to do something about it!