Try new foods this Thanksgiving!!

We often wait years, here in New England, for the second warm-up of weather. The known Indian Summer in October is famous but what is this second warm up called? After much searching in books (yes, I still use paper books) and the internet...apparently, no one knows. We are having cool nights and quick warm-ups during the day... And the warmth is glorious. This warmth is giving us slackers (I am one of them) some extra time to spend in the garden, getting ready for winter, cleaning our yards and simply enjoying the brightness of the sun before the intimidating gloom of deep fall and the onset of winter. Wishful thinking allows New Englanders (including myself) to hope that winter will be mild but the gardeners within us hope for a normal winter with normal precipitation so that the growing season will be as fruitful next year as it was this year.

Our family ventured into a new area this year by growing a new-to-us type of squash, Buttercup. Butternut is the old standby for the Thanksgiving table. It's a brightly colored orange and a sunny addition of color to any table that holds all the browns of gravy, turkey and stuffing. As wonderful as it is, it's a bit plain without added seasoning.

Buttercup on the other hand? It's so brightly colored it literally glows and it truly doesn't need seasoning before putting on the table. 40 years of eating Thanksgiving dinner could have been improved by simply changing the type of squash...To top it all off, we could have easily grown it ourselves...it grows anywhere. With nine seeds we grew enough to supply us with a winter of feeling good three times each week.

79 pounds a week out of the veggie garden will keep us healthy way beyond winter. Most of the vegetables were potatoes and squash but those root veggies have a plethora of much needed vitamins, specifically designed for the winter gloom onset in our bodies. Vitamin A, being at the top of the list, works in conjunction with Vitamin D and helps us feel better all'round.

To get your Vitamin A more easily, bake your squash before separating it from the skin...it scoops away from the skin with a simple spoon. Cutting the squash in half is the hard part but if you have a cleaver and a clean area on your back deck, one good swing with the cleaver can make it truly easy to split. The simplest way to process the tons of squash we had this summer is to chop all in half right out of the garden and freeze just as they are. When you're ready to 'up' your intake of Vitamin A, thaw the halved sections, turn flesh-side down in a 9 X 13 pan in an inch of water and bake for 20 minutes to an hour...The bigger, the longer...the longer, the easier it is to scoop out.

Thanksgiving usually falls into the tried and true's of traditions and old standbys. If we were truly trying to replicate the first harvest we would be eating venison and lobster and celebrating our harvest in August and early September when the produce of the garden is plentiful. Trying new foods by growing them is only one way to tempt your palate. Buy small varieties and make Thanksgiving a ritual of helping others expand their tastes and traditions by including at least one new dish each year. Give that old green-bean-salad some competition.

 

Mahoney's announces new online blog with local gardening tips - Wayland, MA - Wicked Local Wayland

Mahoney's announces new online blog with local gardening tips - Wayland, MA - Wicked Local Wayland

Hybridization: simply put.

When putting the garden away from the plethora of harvesting during summer, pay attention to the fallen tomatoes.  In spring, those fallen beauties create volunteer plants by the hundreds and frankly, its heartbreaking to rip them out.

Those volunteers cant be trusted especially if you have grown hybrids in your soil.  Hybrids volunteers will grow the following season and every gardener should know that hybrids are a little tricky the second year.  Hybrids are a combination of two parent plants pollinated with each other to create the baby fruit.  The seeds from that baby tomato are the source of plants for the greenery in the greenhouses all winter and into spring when you purchase them and bring them home for your garden.  Once grown however, the seeds from that hybridized tomato will create seeds that are not as reliable for the second generation.

Hybrids are created and designed by the perrson who wants to get a better tomato or better resistance to bugs in a tomato plant or both for one generation only. The parents (first generation, FG) determine the results and the seeds of the baby (second generation, SG)will develop a grandbaby-plant (third generation, TG) that includes many characteristics of the parents and not all of those characteristics are good.

When growing hybrid plants, the seeds from the grandchild-tomato (third gen.) might and usually does have the grandparent-tomato's (first gen.) dominant characteristics. Those dominant characteristics may or may not provide you with a terrific tomato or a terrific plant.
 
For example, tomato A and tomato B (first gen.) are pollinated together to create tomatoes on each plant.  When the seeds of both are tested by growing them, the hybridizer finds that tomato A produced better tasting tomatoes that are also semi-resistant to blight while tomato B had tomatoes with little taste and a strong resistance to blight. With taste in mind the hybridizer sells tomato A's seeds as a great tasting tomato with a little resitance to blight. This hybridizer also takes tomato B's seeds (second-gen. labeled B2), grows them into plants and interpollinates the plants(A+B2 and B2 +A) again.  The resulting tomato A and seeds (also second-gen. +B2) on tomato A the second time is a significant resistance to blight and a fairly good tasting tomatoes.  The resulting tomato on B2 is a fabulous sweet tasting tomato with moderate resistance to blight. He (the hybridizer) sells seeds from tomato A but this time it is with the advertisement of a terrific resistance to blight as well as good flavor. He also sells the resulting seeds from B2 as a fabulously sweet tomato with good resistance to blight.
 
We grow those tomatoes at home and the resulting harvest is substantial and wonderful in taste.  Our thoughts are to grow another (third) generation of the same and we save the seeds.  The following year, we plant the saved seeds on the window sill inside, we nurture, water, fertilize and carefully transplant to the garden and nurture, water, and fertilize even more. When it is time to harvest the first tomato, the taste of the tomato is horrible (similar to tomato B's taste) and we have no idea why.
 
The reason? The dominant gene for taste in tomato B is still in the DNA of the third generation tomato seed (B2) and being the dominant DNA, the taste is what comes though into the third generation of seeds.
 
Why did it do that?  Tomato A was missing during pollination.  Without tomato A's pollen, the dominant DNA for taste was missing and the strongest gene for taste came from the original grandparent tomato B.
 
This is why so many gardeners are returning to heirloom tomatoes. Heirloom tomatoes naturally have terrific taste, and resistance to blight.  Heirlooms also are open polinated meaning that any tomato plant can pollinate them during their offspring cycle. The resulting seed is hybridized but it is a hybridization of two open pollinatted plants and many of those plants have terrific characterisitics.  There is one problem though.  When you harvest from an open pollinated tomato plant, the resulting seed next spring may not produce the same characteristics as the parents.  This is due to natures open pollination system and you will have a hybridized plant.
 
Avoid this is by planting the different tomato species 200 feet apart and not down wind from each other.  You could also plant them on either end of the house.  This will stop the bees (and other pollinators) from visiting plants consecutively and pollinating all the open pollinated plants at the same time. Of course you could also go to extremes and plant them in a closed environment to make sure that the tomatoes are not hybridized with and to each other.
 
Disadvantages for the home gardener:
This is one of the factors that gardeners face when exchanging seeds online.  many garden websites have exchange groups that exchange not only plants but seeds as well.  Those seeds, if they are heirloom, may not be true to form and they might produce non-true tomatoes (or whatever else you are trading) the following year. If you exchange seeds or plants, be watchful of this problem and don't exchange what you have unless you know it is true to form.
 
Advantages for the home gardener:
If you are into hybridization yourself or would simply like to try it for the first time. Plant two different species of heirloom tomatoes on one side of your home. Choose a wall that is out of the wind and is exposed to at least twelve hours of light per day mid-summer. When summer comes the wind changes a bit here in the valley, so be sure your tomatos are not being pressed against the wall by the wind.  This will also ensure that the wind is coming from the opposite direction so the tomatoes are protected from the wind.  You are not protecting the tomatoes from the wind, but from the pollen carried on the wind.  If you want to hybridize tomatoes, this is very important. You do not want any other pollen to have the chance of reaching the blossoms of your tomatoes.
 
Waiting a year to see what your results are is the hard part but you may find that you are truely good at this hybridization "thing" and want to do it again.  Enjoy!!!!