Different colors in tomatoes give different nutrition

Sunday, February 23, 2014

There is an amazing array of colors for just about any vegetable.  The most popular American vegetable, the tasty tomato is no exception.  There are yellow, green, orange, tie dye, pink, brown, indigo, and black tomatoes.  The bluish, black tomatoes that are the “in” tomato are also super tasty and nutritious.  Many of these dark colored beauties were developed using traditional breeding.

Here is a run down of the nutritional profile of each of the color families of the tomato:

Pink and red tomatoes: Great source of vitamin A (25% of your DV), lycopene (a powerful antioxidant), vitamin C (30% of DV), and potassium (10% of DV).

Indigo, purple, brown, black:  They are chock full of anthocyanin as well as the rest of the goodies in red tomatoes.  Anthocyanin is the super charged antioxidant found in blueberries.  It comes from the indigo color.  

Orange and yellow tomatoes:  Have lower levels of lycopene.  The lighter the color, the less lycopene is present.

Green tomatoes:  Since they don’t have the red color, they also do not have lycopene and have little vitamin A.

The winner in the nutrition race is clearly the bluish, brownish, blackish tomato!  Not only are they have the most vitamins and minerals, but they also taste fantastic.

Even if you only have a pot, you can grow tomatoes.  There are many compact varieties available!

Many think the tomato came from Italy.  They actually are from the Americas.  Tomatoes were first discovered in the Andes of South America more than two thousand years ago and first cultivated in Mexico.  When the Spanish came to America in the 1400’s, they took back the tomato to Europe.  For many years, Europeans thought it was poisonous and it was grown only as an ornamental.

The Italians and Spaniards were the first Europeans to introduce tomatoes into their cooking, perhaps as early as the 1500’s.  It came to the colonies around 1745 in Williamsburg by a Jewish doctor of Portuguese decent.  The rest, as they say, is history.  Tomatoes are the most popular vegetable grown in the United States today.

Nutritional value of lettuce types

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Lettuce is rich in vitamin A and K and a good source of folate and fiber.   Ever wonder which was the most nutritious lettuce variety?

Here is a quick run down:

*Most nutritious-Romaine

*Runner up-Loose leaf

*Next-Bibb (butterhead) lettuce

*Least-Crisphead/Batavian lettuce

USDA Chart of Lettuce Nutrients

Romaine lettuce has long, upright leaves with thick stems.  Romaine lettuce gained fame in the Caesar salad.  Today, you can get the traditional type, Parris Island Cos, shorter types like Cosmo, red speckled Forellenschluss, and deeper red types like Marshall or Outredgeous.  Romaine lettuce does moderately well in heat and shade and likes loose, rich soil.  For a great summer variety, Jericho thrives in hot weather.

I love loose leaf lettuce.  It is a great all around green to have.  I will cut off the lower leaves as I need them for salads, letting the center continue to produce leaves, harvesting lettuce for weeks this way.  Loose leaf is more tolerant of soil conditions than Romaine and there is a bevy of types out there.  My favorites are Oakleaf, Mascara, Simpson Elite, and Red Sails.  Red Sails stayed sweet well into summer last year.  I sow loose leaf seed about every 3 weeks to keep a continuous harvest.

Butterhead lettuce is succulent!  I just love the texture and juiciness of this lettuce.  The butterheads make smaller heads with lighter centers.  Buttercrunch is a popular variety.  There are the typical green and many with red coloring like Drunken Woman Frizzy Headed.  Gotta love that name!  Tom Thumb is a cute little heirloom pre 1850’s.  It tolerates heat well, too.  Winter Density has excellent cold tolerance.

Crisphead/Batavian lettuce is very refreshing with its high water content and tight heads.  These lettuces require a very long growing season and do not tolerate hot temperatures so plant early in the spring.  The famous Iceberg lettuce is part of this crisphead lettuce family.  Tennis ball is a pre 1804 medium sized lettuce grown at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson is best grown in the spring.  Loma is a heat tolerant variety that does well spring through summer.

Lettuce is a cool season crop, thriving in spring and fall.  Hardened lettuce can survive to temperatures that drop to 20 degrees.  Lettuce seeds germinate in temperatures between 40-75 F.  I scatter sow seeds in early March in pots that I keep in full southern sun.  Pots warm up much faster in the spring than the ground so you get a head start by using pots.

Seeds are here!

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Seeds have arrived in your neighborhood big box stores!  It is officially time to pick out your garden’s desire for the coming season.

For those with small spaces, I love the Burpee seed packets.  They have right on them if they are small space conducive.  The little clay pot in the lower right hand corner with a check mark on it means they were bred to do well in pots.  If they will do well in pots, they are great for any small space.

I have seen seeds at Meijer grocery stores, Drug Mart, Lowes, Home Depot, and Ace Hardware.  So many places are carrying seeds.  Great sign that more and more people are buying seeds and growing their own food.  Love it!

For Zone 6, you can start asparagus and onion seeds either indoors or with protection outdoors now.

How I started my Victory Garden

Victory Garden on the Golf Course

Every gardener has their own story on how or why they got started gardening. 

I have fond memories of long summer days at my Granny’s. She had a BIG garden. My sister and I were always Granny’s little helpers. Of course, she was also a wonderful cook.

I migrated from flowers to herbs and most recently to veggies. I love fragrance and ran across a clearance herb book. It listed many herbs that could be grown indoors. I thought that would be a great idea to grow good smelling herbs to freshen the house over the winter. When spring came, I transplanted them outdoors.

I toyed with adding veggies, but wasn’t sure how that would work out, living on a golf course! We don’t have a big yard and we couldn’t till up the back yard to put in a garden.  It also had to meet the landscaping requirements of the golf community.

I decided to try it out, incorporating vegetables and herbs into my flowerbed. Our concerns were diminished when the golfers began complementing us on our “flowers.” It is amazing how much you can grow in very little space and how great it can look!

Through my trials and tribulations of learning to garden on my own, I imagined my Granny looking down at me with that twinkle in her eye and a huge smile, laughing along with me.  I know she would be proud of what a little gardener I have become and how much we get from our little patch of land.

                   

I wanted to grow veggies like my grandmother did, the old fashioned way without chemicals.  I read a lot of magazines and books to learn how to grow organically in the small space available in the flower garden and pots on the patio.

I intersperse our vegetables and herbs with our flowers.  Not only does it look beautiful, but the flowers attract the pollinators that increase the amount your vegetables produce.  I plant my cabbages and peppers with petunias in pots that we use on the patio and line the border of my vegetable garden with day lilies and marigolds.

Petunias with Peppers on left, with Onions on right

I have learned you can grow healthy plants without chemicals.  The “bad” bugs came the first year.  It took a couple of years for the beneficial insects to proliferate to keep the “bad” bugs under control.  I even learned companion planting and simple crop rotation to help with diseases and keep pests down.

We grow the basic herbs; herbs are so easy to grow.  Oregano, basil, rosemary, thyme, savory, basil, chives, borage, salad burnet, dill, garlic, mustard all live happily.

               

We grow all the produce we can eat and have much left over to put away for the winter.  Tomatoes, peppers (cayenne, Ancho, Jalapeno, Pimento, sweet peppers), zucchini, eggplant, cucumbers, lettuce, chard, French sorrel, purslane, onions, broccoli raab, sunflowers, Fava beans, strawberries, cabbage.  I struggled with broccoli, the rabbits were eating it as fast as it grew!  The green rabbit fencing that I put around each broccoli plant is now keeping them at bay.

I use many compact or dwarf types so they will not over power the small garden space or pot.  I have found that lettuce, hot peppers, cabbage, and zucchini all grow very well in pots.  I do succession planting for lettuce to have lettuce spring, summer and fall.

I even bought a NatureMill composter so that I can compost in the garage.  Between composting and recycling, we have very little that has to go to the landfill.

I learned to can a couple of years ago to put up all the extra tomatoes we had.  I also put up a few jars of sugar free fruit using pectin and stevia.

                                    

I learned to blanch and freeze greens, peas, and beans.   To dry herbs, garlic, harden winter squash.  To make and freeze pesto with our extra basil and parsley, make pickles.  We even get raw milk from a local farmer and make cheese and yogurt from any we don’t drink.

                           

As I got started gardening, other family members wanted to get started on their own and were asking many questions.  To help guide them and to keep track of what was happening in the garden, I started my own blog and called it “Victory Garden on the Golf Course.”  I named it after the victory gardens grown to help the WWII effort.  I think we are in a similar situation today; our country needs our help in battling the war on ill health.  We can grow our own food in small spaces.  It is more nutritious, it takes so much less energy, can be grown with zero chemicals, and is so convenient to be able to walk right out your door for your dinner.

I love being able to get others gardening as well.  I was given an Egyptian walking onion from a B&B in Kansas.  It is a perennial that grows great in a pot or the ground.  It puts on bulblet tops every June.  This year, I took all of them to a woman’s breakfast we were having at work (I am an engineer).  I was blown away by the interest and enthusiasm of these hard-working women on growing their own onions. 

I believe the tide has turned and growing your own and eating nutritious food.  It is so heart warming!

Potted veggies and herbs

Greens in Earthboxes and cabbage with petunias in pot

Saturday, February 1, 2014

You can grow a complete vegetable and herb garden in a small space and/or in pots.  There are so many varieties today made for the small space gardener!  

If you are just starting out and have limited space, look for descriptions like “patio”, “compact”, “great for pots”, “container”, etc.  Here are some recommendations for your small space or container garden.

Greens-Pak choi or Toy Choy Pak Choi, arugula, leaf lettuce like Oak Leaf (for cut and come again harvests), Little Gem lettuce for whole heads, Dwarf Blue Curled Scotch Kale, Orach, Dazzle lettuce, Tennis Ball butterhead, Gala mache, Space Hybrid spinach.  The list goes on and on!  In pots and small spaces, I harvest the outer leaves of plants when I need them.  This extends the harvest tremendously. 

Onions-I grow Egyptian walking onions in a pot.  You can use the bulb for cooking and the tops as chives.  Chives and garlic chives are also great for small spaces or pots.

Egyptian walking onion

Beets-any.  I plant these around my pepper plants.

Carrots-get the short ones like Atlas and Parisian are made for containers.

Celery surprisingly does very well in a pot by itself.  It loves water so I would keep it by itself.  Chard as well.  Chard comes in beautiful colors, too, so you can plant them in your flower bed as an ornamental that you get to snack on.

Cucumber-Bush Champion, Spacemaster, Rocky, Lemon, Patio Snacker, Salad Bush.

Eggplant-All I have tried in a pot grows well.  For flavor, I think the Casper and White Egg do very well and does not get bitter in the hot days of summer.  Other small varieties include Fairy Tale, Gretel, Hansel, India Paint, and Thai Purple Blush hybrid.

A word about hybrids.  If you want to save seed, hybrids will not come back true to the “mother” plant.  You will want open pollinated or heirloom varieties for seed saving.  The strength of hybrids is that they have been bred to withstand different common diseases.

Green beans-go for pole beans and use a trellis so they grow up.  If you don’t like removing the “string” that some green beans have, look for “stringless.”  We discovered a new variety we really liked from a Dienger Farms-an Italian flat green bean.  I looked up Italian pole green beans and I found the variety Roma, Supermarconi, and the yellow Bean Marvel of Venice, Bean di Spagna Bianco.  May have to try one of these this year!  Produces right up until frost.  The great thing about beans is that they make nitrogen so they fertilize the soil.  I plant petunias in the same pot.

Peppers-I have found that hot peppers do great in pots.  I plant one pepper type per pot.  Sweet peppers, like Bell, do best in the ground for the heaviest harvests.  Sweet banana or other smaller sweet peppers do well in containers.  To keep the peppers coming, harvest when green.  It is like the plant has a max number of peppers it can handle and as soon as it hits that number, it will produce no more until one is harvested.  

Pepper with petunias

Summer squash - Bush Zucchini, Lunar Eclipse/Sunburst, Piccolo, Small Wonder Spaghetti squash, Anton, Patio Star, Giambo, Bush Baby.

Winter squash-Acorn or butternut.  Plant where you are okay with them running on the ground or train them up a trellis.  You will get about 2 per vine.

Tomatoes-look for patio or container types.  Varieties like Balcony Patio Princess, Balcony, Tumbler, Lizzano, BushSteak, Tumbling Tom to name  a few.  I had great luck with these bush varieties last summer Early Girl Bush, Better Boy Bush, Patio, Husky Red, and Better Bush.

Couple of seed finding tips-you can do a seed search at Mother Earth News.  Here is the link:  http://www.motherearthnews.com/find-seeds-plants.aspx 

You can also get a listing of seed companies at Mother Earth News to see where they are located and what they sell (organic, biodynamic, heirloom, etc.).