THE LETTUCE SPROUTED

But just barely.  I'm posting a picture now because the Weekend Cook and Tell challenge at Serious Eats ends today, and I said that I was going to start lettuce to chase the winter veggie blues.  I'd hoped they would be up by Monday, showing their two little cotyledons by today, but perhaps the 3 year old seed is pushing its limit.  Sometimes as seed gets older it is technically viable, but may germinate more slowly and give plants that aren't as vigorous.

What you see is the little upside down u of the emerging stem, with the seed coat still partly submerged in the soil (looks like they could have been buried a little deeper).  The soil will catch and hold the seed coat, allowing the green first leaves (cotyledons) to unfurl.  Pictures of that when it happens.

The top picture shows how close I actually have the pot to the underside of the light (about 2 inches).  The black panel is the exterior of the fixture's hood. The cool flourescents give some heat, so it's just as well the pot is in a cool room. There is greater intensity to the bulb toward the center, so that's where I have my little lettuce seedlings.

I'll show weekly pictures of this lettuce as it develops.

HYBRIDS or HEIRLOOMS

Whether to choose hybrid or heirloom seeds is one of several choices to make when buying seeds.

Hybrids are created by crossing two varieties, sometimes by hand,  manually placing the pollen from one variety onto the stigma of another variety. This is very labor intensive, so hybrid seeds are more expensive than non-hybrids. They are often worth the added price because they are more vigorous, more productive, and often more resistant to diseases.  There wouldn't be any reason to go to all this trouble if there weren't an advantage. The seeds from hybrids won't reliably produce the same plant again, so you need new seeds each time you want to grow the hybrid. 

For commercial growers one of the advantages of hybrids - in tomatoes, for example - can be increased resistance to bruising.  Good for shipping long distances and enduring squeezing in the produce aisle. Not necessarily a great trait in the home garden, where a tender juicy tomato is prized.  For other vegetables hybrids may produce a heavy crop all at once - so the beans, let's say, can be picked in one mechanical pass and then torn up and the ground replanted with something else.  Saves a lot of labor at harvest.  This might be an advantage if you freeze or can and want a lot of one vegetable at one time.  Most of us would like an extended harvest so we have beans over a long time with one planting.

Heirloom is the current (fashionable) name given to open-pollinated varieties, also sometimes called "standard" varieties  These produce the same variety each year from saved seed. These means you can save the seed yourself and save that expense.  Most of us value taste over all other traits in our home garden, and heirlooms usually (but not always) have great flavor, which is why someone has bothered to save the seed for so many years.  They often aren't as productive as hybrids.  Brandywine, for example is a tomato with a reputation for outstanding flavor, but when I grew them I was disappointed by how few tomatoes I got.  So breeders have tried to create hybrids that taste nearly as good but are more productive.  Burpee's version is Brandy Boy, which I've grown several times.  For a long time I thought Rose was Johnny's hybrid version of a Brandywine, but then I noticed they say it's an heirloom (but they don't list it with the heirlooms. hmm).  It tastes like a brandywine and has hybrid vigor.  Perhaps they aren't eager to point out you can save your own seed.  Lots of people say they miss that "old time tomato flavor."  They might very well miss Rutgers, a standard (heirloom) variety bred at Rutgers University, that at one time accounted for 75% of tomato production in this country.  The seeds are still available and very inexpensive, and I often grow Rutgers.

There's no precise definition of an "heirloom," but it's often reserved for varieties that have stood the test of time and been around for 50 years or more.  It's a romantic term that is to some extent marketing language.  But new open-pollinated varieties are being created too, by cross-pollinating either intentionally or just letting nature take its course and then growing the results for several genertions and seeing what the consistent results are (whereas an F1hybrid is the first generation of a cross). One year some tomatoes sprouted in my garden in the spring and I didn't pull them up.  I got a very short plant with tomatoes that sure tasted like sun golds.  I ended up pulling up the plants, which was really stupid, because a patio sun gold tomato would be a really great thing.  Not having been produced by hybridization, the seed might have come true in succeeding years.

Most tomato plants for sale are hybrid, while many pepper plants are standards, and that's okay.  When you're buying seeds look for words like: vigorous, extended harvest, early, productive, great flavor, disease resistent, and match them to your needs in your garden.

PLANTING LETTUCE SEEDS

I said a couple of posts ago that I'd probably wait until January 1st to start my winter lettuce seeds, but over at Serious Eats the weekend Cook and Tell challenge is to tell "how you are coping with your Winter Vegetable Blues."

I'm hoping to cope by growing lettuce for the next couple of months until I need the lights for tomatoes and peppers. So I started some seeds this evening.  Planted rather liberally in a 4 inch nursery pot, in potting soil.  Just barely covered and watered a little.  I'm hoping they'll be up by Monday.  I'm starting them in the kitchen because the room I would usually grow them in is about 50 degrees, and although the lettuce wouldn't mind the cold I would.  They will probably start a little faster in the kitchen.

The picture above (from the summer garden) is probably the lettuce mix (in fact, probably from the same seed packet) that I'm starting: Johnny's Allstar Gourmet Lettuce Mix. It's a 2007 seed packet, but the "usual" seed life for lettuce is 3 years.  The Territorial Seed catalog has great cultural information, and the usual seed life is one of the pieces of information they give.  Not on the website though, so you'd need to order the catalog, and that's a good thing to do.

PLANNING TOMATOES

I ended the gardening season promising myself I was going to cut down on the number of tomato varieties.  This is what I usually do, and sometimes I've succeeded.  I used to plant about 25 varieties, and was down to about 12 this year, but then the catalogs came.  I'm a sucker for new varieties, even though I've discovered over the years that when a new vegetable is introduced the descriptions of its flavor, size, vigor, disease resistance are all a little more optimistic than - over time - the plants can live up to. There's a reason the old vegetable varieties are still around.  They taste good and generally yield well and tolerate less than ideal conditions. Nonetheless, I try out some new ones every year and I probably always will.  Hope springs eternal in a gardener's breast, or she probably wouldn't be gardening.

 If I had succeeded in paring down for next year I would have grown just 5 varieties: 
Sun Gold cherry tomatoes
Big Boy
Lemon Boy
Orange Jubilee
Big Mama

If I had to choose one it would be, strangely enough, the sun golds (pictured above).  From mid-July to mid-October hardly a day goes by that I don't walk by the plants and eat a few of the fruity little jewels.  After trying lots of varieties of red tomatoes I've settled back in to Big Boys as the bulk of my reds.  The aroma as well as the flavor really mean tomatoes to me, as we mostly grew Big Boys through my childhood.  The Lemon Boys have a nice mild flavor even when Septoria Leaf Spot has stripped most of the leaves from the plants.  They keep very well on and off the vine, and are tasty over a long period of time, unlike lots of tomatoes that have to be picked and eaten at the peak of ripeness.  This is also somewhat true for the Orange Jubilee, an underused orange that I have a hard time finding now (totally tomatoes calls it golden jubilee - I hope!)  I like to make an orange tomato/orange marmalade, and these are the ideal tomatoes for that.  Big Mamas are very large paste tomatoes that ripen all the way through and stay on the vine well, which is not as true of San Marzanos, which really set the standard for flavor for paste tomatoes.


The other tomato varieties I grew this last summer were:
Golden Mama (yellow paste. insipid tomato, but very productive and they resisted the blight)
Big Beef
Supersonic (good flavor, about the size of a Big Boy)
Rutgers (at one time 75% of tomatoes in this country were Rutgers, and if you miss that old time tomato flavor this is the tomato for you.  Not a hybrid and not as disease resistant as some.
Costoluto Genovese - a neighboring gardener grew them and gave me some plants.  They succumbed to the blight, so I only got a couple, but the flavor was very good
San Marzano
Brandy Boy - Burpee's hybrid version of a Brandywine.  Outstanding tomato, but last year they didn't ripen well for me.  Johnny's version or a hybrid Brandywine is called Rose, and I may go back to them.
New Girl - Johnny's seeds.  An early girl but much better flavor than Early Girl.