Garden Experiments

We have kept a vegetable garden for many years and have favorite vegetables that we always grow, but each year I like to try something new just to keep things interesting. This year the experiments are corno di toro peppers (a sweet, slightly spicy Italian pepper), blue potatoes, and leeks.

I chose the pepper from the R.H. Shumway catalog, which described it as long and thick fleshed with few seeds. I started the corno di toro seeds indoors on April 3, along with pimento seeds saved from our 2008 crop. (Pepper seeds are long lived.) Both varieties were ready to transplant outdoors in mid-May, after our last frost. I intended to set out four pimentos and only two corno di toros, but I must have mixed up the plant labels because we ended up with five corno di toros and only one pimento. Luckily, the prolific corno di toros are quite delicious and amazingly long.

We have been eating them in salads, and will use some in stir-fry. I also will roast some in place of the pimentos I usually roast and freeze for winter use. The corno di toro flesh is not as thick as the pimento, but it will suffice, I think. I like them well enough to save seed for next year.

The blue potatoes are just a novelty and I won’t grow them again. I roasted some of the smaller ones recently. They tasted like any other potato and weren’t blue all the way through. Here they are in preparation.

Last spring I bought a 4-inch pot of leek seedlings on a whim for $1.29. There were 14 little plants in the pot. They resembled blades of grass. We lost two of them to garden cutworms before Dennis stuck a ten-penny nail in the soil beside each seedling. They seem to have no other pests and require no care beyond weeding. The leeks are still growing and not ready for harvest, but they are robust plants and I have high hopes for them. Leeks in the grocery store cost about a dollar each, making this little crop worth $12.

Some things are too important to experiment with, such as the roma tomato that I always start from saved seeds. This is the tomato I preserve for winter use. The roma is fleshy, flavorful and has relatively little juice. When we returned from Colorado Dennis picked more than half a bushel of romas from our seven plants.

This afternoon I will blanch them, remove the skins, cut them in three or four slices and simmer them for about 10 or 15 minutes. When they have cooled I will ladle them into plastic containers and put them in the freezer. They will be there, ready for soup, sauce or stewed tomato dishes all winter and into the spring.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer