Getting my Cherokee Purple Tomato Season On

Cherokee Purple Tomato Plant in my Garden

A lot of people thought I was crazy when I transplanted my Cherokee Purple Tomato plants outdoors in April here in zone 7a.  I checked the weather for the next 10 days on my iPhone weather channel app, which is a free download in your app store.  The app is also available for your Droid as well.  

With that said, the app showed that the weather for the next 10 days was going to be great, with some rain sprinkled in, and the overnight temps were not going less than 40 degrees, which is fine.  The roots should set up nicely!

The Cherokee Purple Tomato is an heirloom variety tomato.  That means you can save the seeds and plant them in subsequent seasons and grow the same exact plant.  I like to pick the first good tomato (of any heirloom tomato plant actually), and save it specifically for the seeds.  

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes: Photo courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_purple

The simplest way of doing it, is to extract the seeds from the tomato onto a paper towel, and just let them dry out.  Once dry, put them in a coin envelope (or a similar small envelope), mark the envelope "Tomato: Cherokee Purple", seal the envelope, and store the envelope in a cool, dry location until the following season.

The Cherokee Purple tomato is not actually purple.  It has more of a reddish-purple coloring to it, and is part of the "black" tomato group.  It is an indeterminate variety, meaning, it can grow at varying heights.  It is known to grow up to as much as nine feet!  

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes: Photo courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_purple

The shape of the Cherokee Purple tomato fruit itself, is similar to beefsteak.  Very large and round where a single tomato can weigh up to a pound.  Although your average weight of each fruit will be a bit less.

The Cherokee Purple tomato's juiciness and size makes it perfect for any sandwich which is my favorite method of consumption.

With proper care, even watering, full sun and bi-weekly feedings with an excellent organic fertilizer such as compost tea or fish emulsion and you can expect your Cherokee Purple tomato plants to mature in as little as 80 days, yielding to you an abundance of these wonderful tasting and dense fruits.

Get Rid of Ants in Your Vegetable Garden

Getting rid of ants in the garden has to be one of the most popular questions that I have personally received in many emails and posts on the vegetable gardening Facebook page.  I probably should have answered how to get rid of ants a while ago, but alas I have not created any blog post to date on the topic, so here are some remedies from the research I have conducted.  

Fire Ants: Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fire_ants_01.jpg

What makes this topic tough is that not all remedies work, and with over 12,000 species of ants, not all ants are technically bad for your home vegetable garden.  So here are some home remedies that you can give a try.

The first idea is one of my own that I read years ago and that is to use cornmeal.   The upside to this method is that you will reduce the ant population, cornmeal is safe for your plants, and it is fairly inexpensive and widely available at any supermarket.

Cornmeal as a Solution

The downside to this method, is that it takes a lot of applications to start seeing results and you may not wipe out the colony, which is probably what you are shooting for here.

Another example of a good ant fighting method that is safe for plants, is direct spraying with a vinegar and water mixture.  Equal parts will do.  I have not tried this method personally as I like the cornmeal method, but the idea here is that the low pH of the vinegar is not good for the ants and it will kill them.

Mix equal parts vinegar and water in a spray bottle

I can see an immediate issue with this method and that is, if you have a lot of ants, this could be a lot of work.  It is also a direct method, which means you are only going to get what you can see.  I highly doubt this will affect the ant colony underneath the soil that you can not see.  If you have a small problem with ants, this could be quick and affective. If your problem is much larger, you may want to go a different route.

Finally, this third method is extremely popular.  Why? Because it works, and it's quick.  OK, fairly quick, but you get the idea.  That is to mix equal parts of Borax and something sweet like jelly in a bowl.  Then place the bowl where your ants are.    Because of the sweetness of the jelly, the ants will surely consume the borax laden concoction and kill the ants.

Mix equal parts borax and something sweet like Jelly

Borax, also known as sodium borate, sodium tetraborate, or disodium tetraborate, is an important boron compound, a mineral, and a salt of boric acid. Powdered borax is white, consisting of soft colorless crystals that dissolve easily in water.

When consumed by the ants they are unable to digest it which really messes them up on the inside.  It has also been said that it wreaks havoc on their exterior as well.  In other words, Borax works as a great one two punch, outside and inside of the ant!

Also according to http://www.boraxforants.com/, when you make a paste with Borax, water and sugar, they will take that gel paste back to their queen which will wipe out their colony, and that is what you are looking for! 

There are even more solutions than these 3.  You can find them at Exterminate House Ants with 13 Natural ingredients.  There you will find all kinds of cool solutions, including the few I wrote about here.

Grow Carrots from Seeds

Every time I cut up a carrot, especially the carrots that I harvest from my home vegetable garden and have grown directly from carrot seeds, brings back memories of my childhood when my grandmother would pull some carrots from her home vegetable garden and use them in her homemade chicken noodle soup.

I remember the image vividly of those long bright orange carrots coming out of the dark rich soil in her home vegetable garden directly behind her Trenton, NJ house.  I remember her cutting those carrots up with a knife, using such precision that the sight of the evenly cut carrot slices would make an electric powered carrot slicer or food processor jealous.

She would then add the carrot slices to her homemade chicken soup broth to soften, and then finish the recipe.  While I have never been able to duplicate her chicken noodle soup recipe, no matter how hard I have tried, duplicating the process of growing carrots from seeds at home in my own vegetable garden has become almost second nature to me these days. 

Growing carrots from seeds, while challenging, is not impossible.  A couple of challenges you will find when growing carrots from seeds in your own home vegetable garden, include, the size of the carrot seed, spacing those seeds out, and, making sure the soil you are growing your carrots in is friable.   That is … the soil for your carrots should be very loose or able to crumble into small pieces.

Let’s first talk about the size of your carrot seeds.  Carrot seeds are very small.  Not as small as celery seeds (celery is another ingredient in grand mom’s chicken noodle soup), but hard to handle on an individual basis nonetheless.  If you plant carrot seeds too close to one another, the growth of your carrots will be inhibited and then you will end up with either small and fat carrots or your carrots will not grow at all.

A good friend of mine online, Gardening Jones, writes a wonderful blog.  On her vegetable gardening blog, she writes a step by step process on how to make your own seed tape and she uses carrot seeds for her example.  I have linked to that blog post here: http://gardeningjones.com/blog/2012/05/01/planting-seeds-made-easier/

A seed tape is nothing more than as out it sounds.  You take your carrot seeds, place them on a long piece of tape, usually a masking tape variety, spacing your carrot seeds out as per the instructions on your carrot seed packet, and then plant the tape (with the carrot seeds on it of course) at the depth that is written on your carrot seed packet.  Moisture and weather conditions will remove the carrot seed tape’s adhesive.  This allows your carrot seeds to be planted as normal except your carrot seeds are nicely and evenly spaced out for optimal growth.

As for the carrot seed tape, or in the case of Gardening Jones’ carrot seed tape tutorial, tissue paper, that will simply erode away and become compost in your soil.  So you do not need to worry about taking the carrot seed tape out once planted.

For the soil your carrots will grow in, it needs to be loose, friable and crumbly.  If you have soil that is heavy in clay, the quickest way to accomplish what your carrots need is to add plenty of perlite, compost and peat.  This will loosen your soil up for your carrots, very quickly.    While perlite and peat are available at any home center, you will more than likely need to make your own compost.  These ingredients also add other useful things to your soil for your carrots; however I will save soil enrichment for another time.

Proper spacing and loose soil will ensure that when you grow your carrots from seed, great results will happen, every growing season.

About the Author 
Mike Podlesny is the author of Vegetable Gardening for the Average Person: A Guide to Vegetable Gardening for the rest of us. Be sure to join Mike`s vegetable seeds mailing list. 

Watch the video below to learn more about Mike`s Seeds of the Month Club:

Storing Your Vegetable Seeds Part 1

There are a number of manufacturers and suppliers of Vegetable Seeds. Farms that sell vegetable seeds in large quantities to vegetable seed distributors to smaller clearing house vegetable seed providers that you can find selling quantities of vegetable seeds more suitable for a small to medium sized vegetable gardens  such as those selling vegetable seeds on eBay and the like.

As a disclaimer, I too operate a company that sells vegetable seeds. Specifically we sell those vegetable seeds to home vegetable gardeners. We buy our vegetable seeds in very large quantities, from farms that, obviously, sell vegetable seeds in bulk. We do so to keep the costs of those vegetable seeds at the lowest possible price and in turn we pass those savings onto our customers.

I would imagine that other vegetable seed companies, who cater to the same home vegetable gardening audience, do the same when procuring their quantities and varieties of vegetable seeds.

But specific vegetable seed companies are not what I wanted to talk about in today’s article on vegetable seeds (or for those that are listening to this transcript via our vegetable seeds podcast).

I wanted to address a great issue on vegetable seeds that I receive questions for from our followers on our Facebook page, where we discuss vegetables seeds and vegetable gardening all the time.

The most popular question on vegetable seeds that I receive, is without a doubt, “how do I save and store my vegetable seeds so that they can be used for future growing seasons?”

For me personally, I like to store my vegetable seeds in a cool dry location. That would translate into putting my vegetable seeds in a plastic container, such as a tupperware or rubbermaid bowl. A resealable ziploc bag works great as well for storing vegetable seeds.

I make sure, that whichever packaging I use to hold the vegetable seeds, they are sealed tight. The vegetable seeds, will then go in a cabinet that I have in my basement, specifically for the purpose of vegetable seed storage. Well, ok, the vegetable seeds do share space with some of the kids’ toys. But that is a whole other topic.

The temperature in my basement is fairly constant throughout the year, which is a perfect storage environment for my vegetable seeds. I have vegetable seeds that are over 5 years old and am still getting great germination success rates on them.

For example, the rule of thumb on many variety of onion vegetable seeds is two years and then the germination rate begins to decline. This past season I grew some onions directly from seeds, sewn into a four foot by four foot raised bed and did well with them. These particular vegetable seeds were 6 years old! I had about an 85% germination rate of these particular vegetable seeds.

Let’s say you do not have a basement to store your vegetable seeds. What do you do then? That is exactly what I will talk about in Part 2 of Storing Your Vegetable Seeds. Some of our Facebook followers came up with some great and unique ways to preserve their vegetable seeds.

About the Author 
Mike Podlesny is the author of Vegetable Gardening for the Average Person: A Guide to Vegetable Gardening for the rest of us. Be sure to join Mike`s vegetable seeds mailing list. 

Watch the video below to learn more about Mike`s Seeds of the Month Club:

Lycopene, Home Grown Tomatoes and Your Health

 

Home Grown Tomatoes

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal researchers showed that men who consumed high levels of the antioxidant, Lycopene, reduced the chance of a stroke by 55%.  The study conducted in Finland, included 1,031 particpants, all male, ranging in ages of 42 to 61.

Lycopene is an antioxidant found primarily in tomatoes but can also be found in watermelon, grapefruit, papaya and mango.

According to the USDA, tomatoes are the number one plant grown in the home vegetable garden in the United States by more than 5 to 1 of it's next closest competitor, the pepper or cucumber, depending on which survey you read.  That translates into a lot of people "growing" their own lycopene right at home.

"Lycopene is a carotenoid compound that accounts for the red color in tomatoes. It is the most abundant form of carotenoids (of a total of 600) in the US diet," says Dr. Lori Shemek the health expert for ABC's Good Morning Texas.  "The bioavailability of lycopene is increased following cooking. And so cooked tomato products have higher levels of lycopene than raw. - This is because the cooking process breaks down the cell walls of the tomato which makes the lycopene more available"

According to Dr. Shemek, who also authored the book Fire up your Fat Burn, she says lycopene is so powerful because it has been shown to protect against degenerative diseases by neutralizing free radicals in a person's body.  "Lycopene may help prevent DNA damage in the cells and help the cells to function better," continues Dr. Shemek.  "High levels of lycopene, in the blood and fatty tissues, correlate with reduced risk of cancers, heart disease and macular degeneration. The human body cannot produce lycopene so it must be obtained from food sources."

While no studies currently exist showing if lycopene levels are higher or lower in home grown tomatoes compared to store bought ones, no one can disagree with how easy they are to grow at home, and taste much better.

When I asked Dr. Shemek how much lycopene one can expect to get from a tomato, she said that one fresh tomato accounts for about 4mg, where as a cooked tomato can be as high as 25mg.  Leading to a fact that such items as tomato soup and sauces will yield higher levels of this powerful antioxidant.

Because lycopene is a cartenoid and phytonutrient found in red fruits there are other options than tomatoes.  Along with the four mentioned earlier, you will find lycopene in various quantities in guavas, red cabbage, and chili peppers.  Just think red, think fresh and you are sure to get a good supply of this healthy fighter.

About the Author
Mike Podlesny is the author of Vegetable Gardening for the Average Person: A Guide to Vegetable Gardening for the rest of us. Be sure to join Mike`s vegetable seeds mailing list.

Watch the video below to learn more about Mike`s Seeds of the Month Club: