If Labor Day is the end of summer, I’m in deep doo-doo. Hoping the garden will last until the autumnal equinox, I know an early frost could ruin my heirloom tomato project.
It all started last year toward the end of August when at the local Food Co-op I came upon a half-barrel of single tomatoes: Big, small, yellow, red, perfect to grossly deformed, one dollar each. Used to growing the old favorites, Early Girl and Sun Gold, I stared at what seemed to be a misshapen rock from another planet.
It was the goofiest-looking tomato ever. Forget smooth, round and red; this thing was lumpy with three main lobes, purple to green to almost black with pleats, deep grooves from stem to stern. I stared, transfixed. How could anything so ugly compete with those smooth, unblemished orbs unless it tasted terrific? I bought one, just to try it. One bite and I knew how this ugly duckling of a fruit had survived in the great tomato gene pool.
Meet the Black Krim (found in Russia in the early ’90s). Next day every last one had been sold. I failed to find starter plants, even seeds, that year, learning I’d have to buy the seeds on April 1 or they’d be gone.
April Fools’ Day and my favorite store, Planet Natural, had already sold out of Black Krim seeds. The owner told me to come back in three weeks, as there would be another shipment of seeds. Then what? Only one packet of Black Krim seeds from a company called Seed Savers Exchange somewhere in the Midwest. Their motto is “Passing On Our Garden Heritage.” For good measure, I also bought two packs of a variety called Cherokee Purple.
So, the first of May, I planted the seeds in small pots hoping for an early summer. Six weeks later I had about a dozen plants sturdy enough to put out in the garden. Trouble was we were still having nights in the low 30s here in Montana. Scary! So I started putting them out on the balcony in the daytime and moving them back inside at night, probably just confusing the heck out of them, but they survived.
In late June, I took a deep breath and transplanted six Black Krims and one Cherokee Purple into a well-prepared bed on the sunniest side of the yard, surrounding them with creamy white marigolds (to ward off pests). Then I drenched the plants in a Vitamin B1 solution to prevent transplant shock.
We’ve heard of “helicopter moms” who hover over their children. Well, I became a helicopter gardener; encasing each plant in its own cage, pinching suckers, removing lower branches, even using my finger to pollinate the flowers as we have too few bees.
Every two or three weeks they get an organic fertilizer called Neptune’s Harvest, organic fish and seaweed stuff; tomatoes and sweet peas love it.
And the watering has to be even or the tomato skins will split. How one can control the watering when every other day there’s a thunderstorm is beyond me.
My fellow gardeners’ Early Girls and Better Boys have ripened and been eaten. My Krims haven’t even grown to size much less begun to color. The packet says 70 to 90 days from transplant. Yikes! Summer may only last 90 days here. Growing this variety is an exercise in patience. And luck.
Then as I was watering and weeding I saw a glimmer of color deep on the low and inside branches. Then another and another. I harvested more than a dozen that day, then another six the next. One was a dead ringer for that goofy-looking one I bought at the Co-op.
The plants have at least three or four dozen more tomatoes in various stages of ripening. And I’m still hovering. Whether to pick slightly green or wait for the color; to risk an early frost or predation from passing deer or our one resident bunny; it’s a puzzlement.
To think we have a generation of folks who think tomatoes are gorgeous to look at and taste like sawdust. Agribusiness has engineered those smooth red baseballs to ride 2,000 miles in an open truck and never look the worse for it. Well, when it comes to food, pretty is as pretty does and those ugly Black Krims have no equal in taste.
Besides, they really are fun to grow.