Tomatoes Redux

Last year I complained about my sorry tomatoes. ("Trouble with Tomatoes," 3/19/18). This year has been a completely different story. We've been having sweet, red tomatoes for over a month now. As a former Master Gardener getting it right should have been a no-brainer for me, but it's taken me only about 25 years to start geting the hang of vegetable gardening in sw Florida.

I suspect that the main difference was much earlier planting. I also used better potting soil and a bigger pot, and positioned it close enough to the hose that it was easy to water. I bought an "Early Girl" start, and fertilized it with slow-release pellets. At the moment the plant is looking rather sorry, and apart from its last ripening fruits, has just a few flowers. There may be something wrong with it, but more likely, it may have run its course.

 Even though it is resistant to both fusarium and verticillium wilt, "Early Girl" is not listed as particularly well-suited to south Florida by the University of Florida, IFAS. However, it was recommended to me by an experienced gardener here, and I was familiar with it from earlier gardening days in Georgia. So far there's been no damage from birds, but the Grackles show up in force in late winter and spring. I suspect them as the main culprits. Insect activity also picks up with warm, windy and dry spring weather.

"Early Girl" Watercolor and Colored Pencil

Last week I planted 2 more tomato slips, and they already have produced small green tomatoes. It will be interesting to see if they have time to ripen before the weather gets too hot. Ditto for the lettuce and sweet alyssum seeds I planted along the rim of the pots.

I'm doing an online course in colored pencil with Wendy Hollander, organized by Karen Abend. It's just a little task each day, and so far I've been more or less able to keep up, despite a frustrating elbow injury. Along with the colored pencil technique itself, it's also a review of basic drawing skills, which certainly is not wasted on me. I'm very pleased with what I'm learning, if not by what I'm doing. I've got a long way to go with colored pencil, as my tomatoes below show. I was trying different colors for shading, and got much too heavy-handed with the dark sepia in the tomato on the left. In fact, two of the tomatoes look more like apples to me.

"Early Girl" - Colored Pencil

I still need to contact Harry's Tasty Tomatoes (see my 3/19/18 post  ). No matter what seeds I may get from him, I think I will keep "Early Girl" on my list of Florida favorites.

I also have beautiful kale under the Fiddlewood. (I need to do a post on that wonderful plant. It provides just the sort of dappled shade under which so many plants thrive, and is a favorite perch for the few songbirds we get here). I'm picking it young, so I can braise it with plenty of garlic and some broth, and then add it to sauces or stir fries. To my way of thinking, a lot of recipes underestimate the time it takes to cook "greens." That includes baby kale. I just keep checking until I think it is tender, regardless of the cooking time given. I don't mind a bit of crunch in most vegetables, but undercooked greens to me are about as chewable as grass clippings, which doesn't mean they have to be cooked "dead," either. The bigger and older the leaves, the longer they need to cook.

Kale Mix from Burpee

The wonderfully textured and/or crinkled leaves are endlessly fun to draw, as long as I don't grimly attempt to get every little curlicue right. This sketch started out as ink (Pigma Micron #005) and watercolor. I made the mistake of using yellow for the highlights, but that made the leaves look sickly, so I tried to brighten them up with watercolor pencil, which didn't work too well, and colored pencil, which worked better. Some of the varieties are very blue-green, which I didn't capture here.