This week’s plant profile is the beloved tomato and how I grow them without irrigation, pest control or imported fertility in the subtropics. Or at least everyone else seems to love them. I’m not so sure.
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Great info Shane. Thanx. Subed.
I tried hanging tomatoes from Mallorca de Colgar. They kept well but tasted awful. Probably my fault.
Looking forward to your next posts.
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Jejeje, we never eat those tomatoes like a salad one, we eat them spread on a toast. Have you tried spread one a toast with some olive oil. Or you can cook them for a stir-fry.
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Richard. No i didn’t try them on toast with olive oïl. I hung the invincible never rotting tomato in my kitchen and tasted it in may, half a year later. They still looked good-ish.
Yuck. What was i thinking!
Do you only eat them on toast or do you pot them up or dry them? Could you tell us about what’s customary on Mallorca?
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I grow Principe Borghese in my cool temperate climate for years, but the bushes are twice in size like your faviourite (60 cm high). In my case they are not that resistant to late blight, but I assume different climate and weather play a role here.
As to your comment on permaculture - in my opinion you are talking about gardening inspired by some permaculture ideas. Permaculture is a design science, not gardening. Permaculture is all about concsious design of systems that fulfilll all humann needs wiyhout harming the planet. Permaculture is based on the three ethics and more that a dozen of the design principles. In permaculture project you are not even obliged to grow a veggie garden, you might design a food forest system that includes only perennials to meet your goals. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong to include in the design a small kitchen garden at your doorsteps where you can see ripening tomatoes from your kitchen window. And a maincrop garden, further from home, where you grow staple food, and in case of my climate the food that keeps you alive over the winter. You can include permaculture orchard and agroforestry systems, and silvopasture, and it is all dependant on relation betweem your goals, conditions, strenghts, weaknesses, resources, etc. Permaculture for sure is not about displaying your crops in social media, but such lovely photos lure more people to permaculture, and one of the main goals of permaculture is to infect as many brains with the ideas of sustainable design as possible. Shiny picture play a big role in that these days, whether we like it or not.
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Of course.
We call them hanging or scrub/mob/bouquet tomato (colgar/fregar for Spanish or penjar/fregar/ramallet for Catalan). Most of the time we eat scrubbed on a toast with olive oil, some ham, cheese or any cured meat or sausages. You can also scrub some garlic on top of it to give it extra flavor. The toast from the bread is typically made from whole-wheat flour, hard exterior with soft interior. Something like this but more whole wheat instead of white bread. At home, we put seeds on the bread to give an extra punch, like sunflower seed, hulless squash seed, chia… or raisins even.
My tomatoes look very different from the photo. Mine are more pink/orange/white on the exterior. Some are more flat, more round or with lumps.
Those are my tomatoes for this year. I let the red spider take over and put web all over it. I find it helps to keep bugs away and under control. Some of the tomatoes suffer from virus or bacteria, but only a fraction less than 2%.
Probably it would be nice to save some tomato seeds from those survivors.
Another use is for a base for cooking, put olive oil, garlic and onions in a pan, let them cook and then add a tomato in chunks. Now you got a nice base to make stew or stir fry. We make the sauce for pasta that way. Then you can add some cream or more tomatoes.
We also hang the spicy peppers in the same fashion.
Other way of store the tomatoes traditionally is dry them under the sun over some canes. The sun hits hard and you can dry them outside. Sometimes, at night, we enter inside the tray made of cane to avoid the dew and prevent it from rotting.
And then you use those dry tomatoes in any kind of meal.
We also air dry other food like figs or grapes. Here you can see the structure of the tray.
We also use canes to hang the tomato plants, we plant in the middle of the structure and let the plant grow and support on the horizontal canes.
Other types or preservation is canning, but I do not think is that old. We put tomatoes in a glass container and boil it.
Additional types of preservation that I saw, is just putting the tomatoes half sliced on some jars with olive oil, they are ready to go.
Apart from long term storage, one of the particularities of this type of tomato is that the flesh is easy to remove from the skin.
Adding to the topic, my neighbor grew some hanging tomatoes without any water this season. They survive more than 5 months without any rain in full drought and no mulch. The tomatoes were small, like cherry size but the flavor was very intense. I got some tomatoes from him and saved some seeds. I will try next year to plant them.
The recommendation I received for dry farming tomatoes is to increase the spacing between the plants. We also apply dry farming to melons and brassicas, mostly cabbage.
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I am really interested in the drying tomato types, so your post was exciting for me.
I have a question about the ongoing topic of taste: could you describe the raw, fresh flavor of these tomatoes when they have just been harvested? If you were to eat one raw and fresh, are they appetizing, or do they need to hang and dry for a while before they reach good flavor?
Sure, It is exciting to me too.
Let’s talk about dry tomatoes.
This collage is some of the bouquet tomatoes available here, the last 3 photos are the tomatoes that I grew this year. Probably there are more varieties available. For me, they look like they got a lot of genetic diversity. From a package of bouquet tomatoes I got 3 distinct shapes. I read an article about conserving local varieties, out of different types of shape and colors available. In general they did not have stable varieties, more like general landraces.
We can call them dry, hanging, scrub, mob, cluster or bouquet tomatoes. Presumably the most used word is “ramallet” and I think bouquet is the best translation for the meaning of the original word.
All of those tomatoes are breed for dry or low watering farming and long lasting storage.
For the taste:
Number 3. You can totally eat them raw. The skin is thin but hard, when you pinch them the flesh detaches super easy. When they are small they remember to me to cherry tomatoes. Flavor is very intense, specially when you water less. Probably the sweetest. Texture is watery.
Number 1. Very yellowish almost white, the insides are a lot more orange. Taste kind of acid when eat from the vine, probably tart. Better to let them mature. The insides ripen to more pink/orange color, but the exterior is more yellow. The texture is kind of sandy. kind of chunkier. We usually eat them on a toast. We choose for consumption, starting with the more intense color and moving towards the lighter ones. I got some super white tomatoes and 3 months later are exactly the same white color.
Number 4. Very similar to 1, but the exterior color is pink orange, and the insides are more intense color. More sweet instead of acid, umami flavour. Texture is similar, sandy, chunky and sticky.
Number 2. They remember me to the typical heirloom tomato. Seeds in that tomato are very undeveloped. Consistent flesh, but with some exterior wrinkles. Umami flavour.
Some of those bouquet tomatoes got an empty cavity inside, between the seeds and the thick wall. Usually some round ones. When I open them I always ask where is my tomato.
This year, my inclination for eating raw tomatoes was these yellow ones. They did not last long when harvest. They did have a hard core in the middle. But I found them super pleasurable.
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