You may find this hard to believe, but I just finished the last of my summer tomatoes.
Well, technically they were late fall tomatoes. With the warm days of Indian summer stretching towards November the vines kept growing and producing fruit. I wasn’t complaining.
Each day I went out to my little garden and found more blossoms and fruit setting on. The vines got so tall at one point ? I registered them at around 7 or 8 feet ? I had to give them a trim to keep them from breaking under the weight of their burdens. I managed to keep my late bloomers going by covering the vines with sheets whenever frost damage threatened.
During the day, I’d remove the sheets, allowing the vegetables to take advantage of the last few rays of warm sun.
When the weather finally turned cold at the tail end of October, I harvested what hadn’t had time to ripen and stored them in a cardboard box on the back porch. The tomatoes ripened slowly, a few at a time, and until a couple weeks ago I had all the tomatoes I wanted.
This was my first real stab at gardening and I had a lot of fun with it. I grew onions, squash, okra, sweet potatoes, two varieties of peppers and three kinds of tomatoes. A few things didn’t work, like cucumber plants and most of the onions and squash. They ended up getting rained out by the late spring deluge.
But all in all, I think it was some kind of miracle year. I grew squash and okra from year-old seed. The okra must have been the Jolly Green Giant kind because I eventually had to stand on my tip toes to harvest it. And I think I was channeling my green-thumbed grandmother when I took the store-bought sweet potato sprouting in my kitchen and decided to “just stick it in the ground” – her solution to any gardening dilemma.
I found a place in the yard, dug a hole and threw it in. Four months later I dug up 5 pounds of sweet potatoes and they were the best I’ve ever eaten. Thanks, Grandma!
But getting back to the tomatoes, at one point I picked what seemed like buckets of Romas, the Italian tomato commonly used in sauces. I managed to process a few quarts and stick them in the freezer for later use. I also had yellow pears ? the sweet bite-size variety from my youth ? including one volunteer plant.
It was truly too much of a good thing and to get rid of them I began forcing them on people as they headed out the door.
But the pride and joy of my summer tomato crop was the Cherokee Purple. Cherokee Purple tomatoes are an heirloom plant, a vegetable believed to have been grown by the Cherokee Indians one hundred years ago in Oklahoma.
When I saw this variety at the greenhouse I grabbed one on pure instinct. It sounded exotic and I thought it would be fun to grow. It turns out I was right.
During some of my online reading about this unusual plant I discovered Cherokee Purples are lusted after by many a gardener. Their flavor is remarkable and many say the fruit reminds them of the flavorful tomatoes grown by their grandparents. Rather than tart, Cherokee Purples are mild, yet rich in flavor. They are super sliced and eaten alone (no salt needed) or slathered with mayo on a BLT.
However, the Cherokee Purple is not pretty. The color resembles a nasty bruise, somewhere between dull red and deep purple to a ghastly blackish green. The tops of the fruits are also prone to cracking. Cherokee Purples may be hideous, but they’ve won a place in my heart. I look forward to growing them again next year.
