Country Mouse Monday: Heirloom Tomatoes and other lies

As in everything else, home gardening and urban farming are filled with trends, the latest of which -- just so you know -- is goats.  But this is not a post about goats, since although I adore them, really and truly love them to pieces, we could never have them here.  There simply isn't anything they would be allowed to eat here, so we'd have to source food for them (a la Novella Carpenter) rather than being able to pasture them and let them eat weeds.  It would be lovely to have them around, look into their dazzling and strange eyes, stroke their funny little flanks.  But this is not a post about goats.

Instead, it is a post about LIES.  

OK, maybe "lies" is too strong a word, but since I'm still pissed at last year's heirloom tomato bust, it's the first word that comes to mind.   This is a post about being careful not to let pretty rhetoric and trends spin your head, about YES trying things and YES having a back-up plan.

Last spring, we bought all of our starts at the annual April plant sale at Indian Valley Organic Farm & Garden -- part of the College of Marin and a truly great resource for young people and the community to learn about home and  larger-scale organic farming in all its aspects.  I was determined to leave as much money as we could at that sale to support their efforts, so we bought a lot.   Including tomatoes. And listening to the Master Gardener shpiel, we went with all heirlooms.

Which turns out to have been a big mistake.  Perhaps we should have gotten one or two, but not all heirlooms.

I get it on the heirlooms, ok?  I understand that whole seed-saving palate-broadening stepping-away-from-monoculture of the heirlooms.  At the same time, I also think that it's a bit like reading a fussy menu in a trendy restaurant -- you know, where they list every ingredient in the dish by name and provenance, all very interesting, but sometimes it tastes as though there's a bit more emphasis on compiling that list than on the flavor of the resulting combination. [And don't get me started on the word "artisanal."]  It's possible there's something wrong with ME, like the time we went to the Seed Bank in Petaluma (see Philistine at the Seed Barn) and I kind of lost it a little, maybe I even whined, asking please could someone just point me in the direction of a good, sweet canteloupe.  All those pretty names just meant nothing to me at all.  Although, yes, the Petit Gris de Rennes we bought did yield delicious fruit.

So last year, we put in three heirloom tomatoes.  Two were Brandywines and the third was a Mortgage Lifter -- so named because its purported yield was so great that it would ease a farmer's financial burden.  Really?

LIES.

Maybe it was partly the weather last year, but we had so few tomatoes, it was just sad.  We definitely got some, but with three plants, nowhere near what we were used to, and certainly not enough to dehydrate or jar up for winter, which is, for me, part of the whole point.  It was just so disappointing to watch and wait and hope and end up with one paltry basket of kinda-ugly fruits to eat, fruits we cooked in a sauce rather than slicing them on a plate, pairing them with mozzarella and basil, drizzling them with olive oil, like we woulda in the past.  They were too ugly for that.  

Lesson learned.

This year we went back to what we know, what has been successful for us in the past, yielding tomatoes in abundance, big fat fleshy delicious wonders in abundance, enough to enjoy all summer and into the dark of winter.  That's right: we went back to the Early Girls and Best Boys of all of our years prior, unwilling to trade what's popular right now for what we know works, what we know will fill our larder with tomatoes for months and months to come, until it's April again and time to begin anew.

But then I fell for the lies again in another way.  This time, for some well-written copy on a seed packet of Phacelia tanacetifolia, "one of the most prolific nectar producers for bees."  So I started a bunch of these Phacelia this year, hoping to match in summer what the borage does for the bees in spring, basically create this endless buzzing area of the garden, filled with bees drinking their fill, zooming back to the hive to unload all that nectar.  It sounded so good.

Not so much.

So OK yesterday finally, after the Phacelia being in bloom for ages, finally I counted maybe three bees on one plant, but really, I was unimpressed.  It's possible I'm spoiled after the orgy of the poppies, the gluttony of the borage, but really, Phacelia, yeah, it's just ok.  And maybe I didn't plant enough of it, which is another difference between it and the bed full of poppies and the bed full of borage, maybe there's too sparse a section of Phacelia to draw bees in, but I'm just not impressed.

It just goes to show, to remind me, that in gardening and urban-farming, as in beekeeping, there's so much to learn but much of that learning really is trying something yourself and figuring out what works for you.  Of course there are general natural rules that can't be over-ridden, but only doing it yourself actually helps you distringuish how much of what you're reading or hearing is marketing from what really works for YOU.  It's so important to remember that this seed packet or that plant may not be All That, that the copy might stretch the truth in the interest of sales or in the enthusiasm of spreading a trend.

None of which is terrible.  It just can lead to some disappointment.

It can feel like lies, really, when what you're looking for is FOOD.

I applaud the people whose mortgages are truly lifted by heirlooms.  For us, though, it's back to Early Girl grown in our organic conditions.  It's back to Best Boy.  And it's back to dinner after dinner constructed around a bumper crop (fingers crossed, since it's only June yet, but it's looking good and better so far), and dried tomatoes all winter long.

Don't believe everything you hear and read.  Try it, but leave some room for it not to work.  Don't be suckers like we were last year and plant only that one thing you've been hearing about.  Try one, try two, but plant a back-up just in case.  When you're eating those jarred tomatoes in the dead of winter, you'll be glad you did.

Next week: The System/The Outfit -- how the right set-up makes all the difference in home composting and beekeeping.