Monday, October 20, 2008

Show me your harvest day

As promised, this is the first of my intended meme on showing me your harvest. On a monday, I encourage other veggie gardeners to post their produce. To kick off I present to you the Winter Keeper Tomato. Here they are sitting on my kitchen counter.

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Winter Keeper Tomatoes

For those unfamiliar with long storage tomatoes, they reputedly keep until New Years or Easter or some other far off tomato-less time. Often it is suggested that they are stored in idividual wrappers one layer deep not touching but Mapple Farms, my seed supplier, said he just kept his on a bowl in the kitchen and that sounded way easier. The type I have ripen from the inside-out which may be a common characteristic of long storage tomatoes but don't quote me.

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Cut open winter keeper. On the outside it looked icy orange and inside, red.

Anyhow, last year something happened to my plant so this is the first year that I have to really experiment. They do appear to be ripening a bit more slowly than other tomatoes that I brought in and I have only had one rot on me but I suspect that the skin had been damaged. I picked them from the just off green to blush stage before frost in late September and they have an acidic but acceptable taste that is far superior to a supermarket tomato, however much less sweet than a vine ripened one.


Also harvesting:

The veggie patch is still going strong after our first true ground frost of the year. We have brassicas including tatsoi, broccoli, cabbage, kale and mustard; roots like carrots and beets and soon to come are the unusual roots (post next Monday); lots of greens like rocket, chard, mache, minituna, salad burnet and so on; and crops like celeriac and florence fennel.

The coldframes are up but the polytunnel has to be constructed again this week as we are expecting dips to -5C. Soon will come the snow.


Links

Mapple Farms - winter keeper (my variety)
Sand Hill Preservation Centre - various storage tomato types

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Okay, I have NEVER heard of storage-type tomatoes before! But if there's a tomato that I can keep until Easter, I'm so there... I will have to visit some of these online ordering places and further investigate. Thank you! :)

Ottawa Gardener said...

I have heard easter before but I always wonder if they harvested theres in November or something ;) I'll let you know how long these ones last.