Posts Tagged tomatoes
Garden Layout
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food, Homesteading on January 25th, 2010
I’ve finished a first pass at my garden layout. You can view it here (you’ll need to click on the “layout” tab at the bottom of the page).
The beds are 30′ by 3′ each. On the spreadsheet, they’re one on top of another, but in reality, what I will have is a four-by-two grid of 30′ by 3′ rows. Hence, the first two beds, which are labeled “1 north” and “1 south” will actually be end-to-end with each other. It’d just make for a lot of scrolling to actually arrange them that way on the spreadsheet.
Coming up with the layout was pretty challenging, especially because there is conflicting advice as to what compliments what and what plants should rotate with what. I ultimately settled on an arbitrary set of advice and left it at that.
You might notice that row 1 north and south are awfully similar and likewise for row 2. Why not combine the plants into blocks? Two reasons: first, separating them might keep pests from migrating between them as easily. If pests find one batch of plants, perhaps they won’t find the other. This is an organic pest-control technique I’ve read about. Second, the south half of my yard gets more sun than the north half, and I’m curious to see the difference in planting the same or similar stuff in both halves.
The peas / corn / squash setup, I’m pretty confident about, as the Native Americans have done it that way for a long time. Usually, beans are used instead of peas, but I haven’t planned for any pole beans this year, and peas are also nitrogen-fixers, so I figure I’ll give it a whirl.
I read that onions can cut down on squash bugs, so I plan to interplant onions, leeks, and shallots around my zucchini and yellow squash. I’m sticking lettuce in there too, mostly because there’s room. I don’t think I need as many onions as it would take to totally fill in around the squash.
In the map, the sweet peppers and the hot peppers look like they’re on top of one another, but like I said, the rows are actually end-to-end, so they’ll be about 32′ apart, to prevent cross-pollination.
The melons at the end of row 1 take up a lot of space, and I could probably get away with planting something quick like lettuce over there, before the vines get too big.
Row 2 starts with a variety of tomatoes. I’m planting two each of slicers, roma, cherry, and tomatillos. These are surrounded by various root crops such as carrots, parsnips, beets, and radishes. The other end of row 2 contains brassicas like broccoli, spinach, collards, bok choy, and kohl rabi. The remaining space is taken up with potatoes.
Crop rotation guides say to plant nightshades (tomatoes and potatoes) and brassicas separately, but I just don’t have enough brassicas to really fill up a row, and I can’t see leaving half the row fallow each year. I figure if the potatoes suffer somewhat from their proximity to the broccoli, well, I’m growing a lot of potatoes. And if the broccoli suffers… it’s broccoli… I mean, come on. Acceptable losses.
Not present on the diagram are all the herbs that I will be or already am growing in planters, as well as garlic, which I started this fall, and will start again next fall, also in planters. I just don’t want to do the work of fitting garlic’s odd schedule into my rotation at this time. Also, I plant to dedicate an entire bed to strawberries, which don’t rotate.
Any advice from gardeners reading is welcome.
Grinding Up Salsa
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on December 2nd, 2009
I love salsa. My favorite is the fresh stuff, pico de gallo, basically just chopped-up tomatoes, onions, garlic, and jalapenos with a little salt, lime, and cilantro. My sister once pointed out how easy it was to make, and it was like a light-bulb going off. Of course I can make my own salsa!
I’ve made pico by hand. It’s a lot of work cutting up all those veggies, but good practice at knife skills, I suppose.
I’ve made it in a blender too, but blenders are really made for mixing liquids. They don’t move mostly-solid mixtures around enough to bring new material into contact with the blades. They just end up puree’ing whatever is at the bottom of the blender, and then, hey, you’ve probably got enough liquid to blend, but you’ve also got a puree. Not good salsa.
I’ve made it in a food processor. That’s pretty good, but the art of getting just the right chunkiness without having big chunks left over and without crossing the line to soupy is a little tricky. And the work bowl of a food processor typically only makes a pint or two of salsa. Not nearly enough for my tastes.
Then my step-mom mentioned to me that she had the food grinder attachment for her Kitchenaid mixer. It had come as a set with the mixer, and she never used it, so she offered it to me. Of course, I had to make salsa!
The grinder produced a little less-chunky salsa than I normally would prefer, but it was still recognizably “salsa” and not “tomato and onion juice-drink”. One thing that I really liked was how consistent the product was.
The ground up tomatoes in the photo above are sitting in a colander, which is placed in a bowl. This is to allow some of the extra liquid to drain out, and reduce the wateriness of the salsa. I still have yet to find a way to produce salsa without it being watery, short of cooking it to simmer off the liquid, but that produces cooked salsa, which is wonderful, but not my favorite. It tends to end up tasting more like spaghetti sauce than salsa.
Everything went into the grinder: tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, cilantro, and garlic.
Issa prepped the veggies by cutting them down to sizes small enough to go into the grinder. This was some work, but not near as much as cutting it all up by hand. We had 15 lbs of tomatoes!
When we were done, there was about two gallons of salsa.
We put about five pints of it in the freezer…
We put about a quart in the fridge for later, and we dug into the rest.
I woke up the next morning with garlic taste still in my mouth. I am vampire-safe.
In case you’re interested, here is the recipe we used. Honestly, you can hardly go wrong.
- Some tomatoes
- Maybe half that much onion, or more if you like onion
- A whole bunch of cilantro, except if you hate cilantro, in which case you can leave it out. Did you know that there’s a bitter flavor compound in cilantro that some people can’t taste? That’s why some people hate cilantro so much and others love it. The ones who hate it have the gene that allows them to fully taste it. The rest of us literally can’t taste that bitterness you hate so much.
- Juice of one lime, or more if you’re making a really big batch
- As much garlic as you can stand to peel, but probably not more than a head. Or three cloves if you don’t want to vampire-proof everybody who eats it.
- About two jalapenos, seeds included. More if you like hot food. Or mix in other types of peppers if the jalapeno’s burn is not exactly what you want.
- Salt to taste. Don’t over-do it!
Hyperbolic advertising: cheese is never opinionated
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing on May 22nd, 2009
It all started with tomatoes. The tomatoes from my friend’s home garden and from the CSA tasted so much better than the tomatoes I got from the grocery store. I was dismayed to realize what I had been missing out on this whole time.
It’s no surprise. I’d never really even tasted a tomato. Commercial tomatoes are bred for size, appearance, and resistance to damage during shipping, not flavor. They are usually picked green and then ripened by exposing them to ethylene.
This got me thinking about the dilution and substitution of experience. My definition of a tomato had been watered down so thoroughly that I hardly knew what I was missing. Of course, the lack of substance isn’t really relevant to marketers, who are happy to supply us with other forms of stimulation to keep us from noticing what we’ve lost.
Which brings me to this commercial, from NBC:
It’s a cute commercial, no doubt, but I found myself thinking, “I really like The Office, but I hardly ever find myself actually laughing out loud at it, never mind laughing my ass off. In fact, I almost never laugh at network TV, even shows I like.”
And then I started to see it everywhere: the unbelievably hyperbolic adjectives used in advertising to describe the experience you are supposed to associate with the product. Advertising has always exaggerated the virtues of the product; that’s nothing new. The interesting thing to me about these ads is the way in which they exaggerate not qualities of the product itself, but the experience that you will presumably have when you use or consume the product. The difference between the promise and reality is profound.
An ad for Petit Ecolier, a chocolate-covered cookie, suggests that you, “Lose and find yourself in one bite.” If that’s the experience that you will have when you eat the cookie, then I want some of whatever chemicals you’re taking. Can a cookie even do that? The ad below describes one woman’s experience of eating a Hardee’s hamburger. As you watch it, think back to the last fast food hamburger you ate, and ask yourself if it “reminded you of being in high school, sneaking out before dinner to savor that sweet, spicy sauce.”
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