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Black Sea Man Tomato

What do you do when you can’t think of anything else to post about?  Make a post about an heirloom tomato!

This is my first full sized tomato to get ripe.  This is a really nice Russian tomato.  It’s mahogany red/brown with green shoulders on top:

Black Sea Man Tomato

Towards the bottom the color changes to a lighter pink/brown:

Black Sea Man Tomato

In the middle brown, red and green:

Black Sea Man Tomato

The taste is really nice and fresh.  It’s a little on the sweet side.

This is a determinate type tomato, meaning it gives it’s entire harvest within a short period of time.  I have planted several of these in the middle of my other greenhouse tomatoes, with the intention of shortly pulling them out and giving the other plants more space.

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Farming in Egypt

Ashraf Al Shafaki has a blog called Egypt Farm.

He recently made a very interesting post about roasted watermelon seeds (that is if you can find a watermelon with seeds to roast anymore).  He is interested in Egyptian heirloom fruits and vegetables.

The only example of an Egyptian heirloom I could think of was the Flat of Egypt beet (and only this after searching on the Internet).

Does anyone else have any ideas of Egyptian heirloom fruit and veg?

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Beans and Tomatoes

Beans and Tomatoes

Here are my first few tomatoes and beans of the season.

The three brown tomatoes are brown berry.  The yellow one is Blondkopfchen.  The tiny red one is Matt’s Wild Cherry.  All were grown in my greenhouse except Matt’s Wild Cherry, which is from my roof.

The beans are Dog bean.  It’s a bush variety, which are usually a little earlier than pole beans.  The Dog bean is a multi-purpose bean, good green as well as dried.   This post has a picture of what the beans look like dry, and they are similar to kidney beans.  Several other bloggers grew this bean before, or are growing it now:  Rebsie, Ian and Gintoino.  I’ve given the seeds to some other people too, so maybe they will post about it when they grow it too.  The Dog bean is probably from Croatia, from the Dalmatian coast.  This bean was selectively bread, then renamed, from a bean originally called the Dalmation bean and there was probably a misunderstanding over what the name really meant.

Update 7 July:

We had the dog beans for dinner last night, and they were really good!  In part I’m sure because they were very fresh.  The flavor was a very intense and delicious.  The texture was also really nice, crispy and chewy.  I don’t think we’ve tasted the green beans of this variety before.

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Bolting Lettuce

Bolting Lettuce

I think bolting lettuce looks funny.  This is a romaine (or cos) variety, and you can see the flower stalk alone is about twice the size of the head of lettuce itself.  I’m growing this on my roof this year to save seeds.

While I’ve grown lettuce off and on for several years, last year was the first I tried to save seeds from it.  I failed, and the reason was I didn’t expect the plants to get so large and I used a container that was too small.  When you see this nice head of lettuce that you can hold in your hands, you don’t expect the flower stalk to get nearly as tall as you are!

The speed in which the flower stalk appeared was also a bit surprising.  This one took about 2 days to develop, whereas the rest of the head of lettuce was months in the coming.

I’m also letting some lettuce go to seed in the garden, but this one I’m growing on my roof so I can watch it more carefully and also because the seeds have dandelion like parachutes, and I want to be prepared to get them in time in case this is an issue.

Lettuce in the home garden has been getting a lot more attention lately.  My friend Lieven has been breeding lettuce for the last few years, and the Seed Savers Exchange is also offering an ever increasing variety.  Its really pretty easy to grow, and if you are prepared for the size not difficult to save seeds from either.