Tomayto-Tomahto

Campus closed for snow and ice, so I'm spending some of my morning picking this year's tomato varieties.


It's hard to choose tomatoes. While the varieties I can buy at Lowe's or Kroger are so hybridized that I can't do much wrong, the heirloom and older varieties are a little more sensitive. For example, I love Black Krims, but they just don't do well in my garden. It's too much work to baby along four or five plants for 10 or 12 tomatoes.

It's also hard to choose because all the varieties look so beautiful in the catalog. It's easy to order too many and end up with 200 tomato plants like we did last year. Who in the world can take care of 200 tomato plants and grow broccoli, too? Not me.

I need some tomatoes for canning. How about Santa Clara Canners? Tomato Growers Catalog describes this tomato as very juicy yet solid, with fruit that weighs 8 to 10 ounces. Perfect for canning. Until I grew Santa Claras, I thought that you were supposed to can the tomatoes that were just not good enough to eat or sell. I highly recommend them. They are kind of picky, though.

When I had to run to the grocery to buy three cans of tomatoes for spaghetti sauce last week, I sorely missed those canned tomatoes gleaming in the pantry. Better not settle for the Santa Claras alone. I think I'll try Bradley, which are described as pink, smooth, blemish free and produce fruits over a concentrated time period. I guess this means I'll have Bradleys overflowing the kitchen sink but only for a little while. These catalog writers must have been trained by the J. Peterman crew.

What else? Paste tomatoes to thicken my sauces: Grandma Mary's Paste, Opalka, Italian Red Pear, Mama Leone, and Howard German. And I can't forget the Polish Linguisas. See what I mean? Six varieties already and I haven't chosen slicers and salad tomatoes yet.

Plenty of choices to make on a cold winter day. I haven't even begun to think of peppers and onions yet.

's No Surprise

By mid-evening yesterday, the temperature had dropped several degrees, and by 8:00, it was snowing. Last week, we had temperatures in the high 60's. But the snow was no real surprise to anyone who lives here. Our weather is predictably unpredictable. 

I almost gave in and planted the Swiss chard yesterday afternoon but settled instead on starting most of the pepper seeds we ordered from Tomato Growers. The chard would have made it--we settled on the "Bright Lights" variety this year--but the snow on top of the seeds would have made me nervous this morning.

The snow is not making the birds nervous. We've had purple and gold finches and cardinals taking turns at the feeders all morning. I don't know how I have missed it for the past 15 years, but February was dedicated National Bird Feeding Month back in 1994. We've had bird feeders throughout the years, but I've never paid more than passing attention to the migrating birds that stop by our yard in the winter. This year, we have feeders filled with songbird mix hanging from each side of the house, and we've identified chickadees, house finches, gold finches, and one skittish titmouse.

I was pretty excited about identifying that titmouse. (Beyond the cardinals and the bluebirds--and an indigo bunting that surprised us one morning with its startling blue-ness--I've never paid enough attention to the birds to see that the titmouse is not a "baby bluejay," as I had told our son before.) I was excited enough to try to attract them to a feeder outside my classroom window at work. I bought a suction-cup feeder hook--which sticks pretty well if you lick the suction cups first--and a lightweight feeder and filled it with songbird mix that was packaged in a bag with a picture of the lovely titmouse on the front.

Three weeks later, on Friday morning, I saw the first titmouse on the feeder at school. I called my students to come quietly to the window, and we waited for him to return. He did, only once, but about half of the students--the ones paying attention and not talking or jabbing each other--saw him, too.

Later in the day, I described the event to an afternoon class; I wanted them to be watching for this sweet little bird, so I also described it: "The titmouse has a crest similar to the one on a bluejay, but the bird isn't blue." A few of them nodded their heads dutifully--What in the world is she going on about?--and a few of them said they knew which bird I was describing. 

But I knew the subject needed to be changed when I overheard one student whisper to another: "She has a crest on her what?" 

Your taxpayer dollars are hard at work.