Cold Climate Gardening

Tomatoes the Old-Fashioned Way
I’ve been reading the The Little House on the Prairie series to my six-year-old at bedtime. We just happen to be on The Long Winter and were reading “Fall of the Year” just a couple of days ago, where the Ingalls were surprised by an early hard frost. Ma and Laura picked all the ripe tomatoes from the blackened vines and made “almost a gallon of preserves.” I wondered if this was just an old way of saying canned tomatoes, but later on it is referred to as sweet preserves by Mary. So did they have tomato jam on toast for breakfast? Does anyone know how people used tomatoes in the 1870s-1880s? Or canning and preserving practices in general back then?

Ma then goes on to make green tomato pickle. People still do this today; Frugal Upstate has a recipe for Fireballs–try them if you dare.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Does this qualify as a ripe tomato? If it does, I think the vegetable gardeners at Purdyville have beat out Carol of May Dreams Gardens for the first tomato. My 23-year-old daughter started the seeds indoors and potted the seedlings on until they were in gallon size pots, maybe larger. Then my husband planted them out in the garden sometime after June 3rd and has been tending them. He brought this one in last night.

Popularity: 7% [?]

An unidentified bee species visits a corn poppyPerhaps, like me, you’ve noticed there haven’t been as many bees flying around this year. If you’re the sort of person who gets nervous around bees, this might even seem like a good thing to you. But perhaps, like me, you notice your apple trees have scarcely any apples on them, and you know that the flowers weren’t damaged by a late frost. This is not a good thing. Multiplied by millions of fruit and almond trees in orchards all over the country, it becomes a very bad thing. They’re calling it Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Popularity: 19% [?]