doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Mildly OT: homegrown foods

Ask it what wine and heirloom tomatoes pair with lutefisk and lefse.

Best,
Ted

I know...it does sound terribly snooty, but it works shockingly well.

Here we are in mid August, and I'm still buying tomatoes from the store or the Farmers Market. I planted some tomato plants, but the deer seem to have developed a taste for them, and they've been eating them just before they are ripe enough to pick. I tried dusting them with red pepper, but it's been raining so often that it just gets washed off. Might have to resort to harsher methods...

I can remember my grandfather saving seeds from his tomatoes and many other plants. I don't ever remember him buying any seeds or plant starts, but he and his friends would exchange vegetable seeds and cuttings.

Keith, find you some kitchen sized plastic trash bags that are scented with mint. Hang them from limbs or other places, so that they can blow in the wind. They help.

We spray a product called Turn Tail around our peanut fields that are damaged by deer, and it works pretty good. It is a mixture of spearmint, peppermint and garlic oils. Deer hate it.

Keith:

You'll notice all my efforts are limited to the space on my deck. The deer here are voracious and we can plant almost nothing in our yard, even trees aren't immune.

I still lose product to the squirrels here but that I can manage (air rifles have come a long way, eh?)

Stanton: Your Turn Tail sounds interesting, where does one find such a product?

You can order it Lloyd. I don't know if it can be bought in small containers. We buy it in 2 1/2 gallon jugs. The rate is a quart to the acre for field borders, or a pint to the acre for whole field applications.

A 2 1/2 gallon jug is a little over $200, AIR.

There are other brands of similar products as well that you might be able to find. Just look for mint oils and garlic oils in combination.

We've been waiting for this basket of tomatoes since late May!



and we've even developed a new summertime drink here...a watermelon mojito (way too easy to drink after a very hot day)! Fresh seedless Watermelon Agua Fresca (Rick Bayless's recipe from YouTube), 2 shots of white rum, a spanked spring of mint and you're on your way baby.



Cherokee Purple on the left, Black Krim on the right.

The flesh on these two heirloom tomatoes has to be tasted to be believed...

It has been so long since I was able to garden that I don't remember the name, but I used a product from our small town "feed and seed store" that worked very well to keep deer out of the garden. The "kit" consisted of a roll of cloth tape to be strung around the garden plot on customer provided posts, and a powder to be mixed with water which was then sprayed on the tape with customer provided spray bottle. The tape was to be installed about waist high but if small animals (rabbits) were also a problem another run of tape was to be installed about ankle high. There was enough of the product included to allow re-freshening the tape and, in my household, garden was enough for more than one year. The liquid, once mixed, smelled of cinnamon and other spices. It was pretty hard to resist drinking some, but it kept the deer out of the garden. I wouldn't pay attention to AI as to which tomato tastes the best, my opinion even differs from my wife's. I'll eat what I like, and the AI machine can eat whatever it likes.
Mike

Bagels and lox for breakfast this morning. The sliced Black Krims were heavenly with it.



I read somewhere that the lycopenes from tomatoes are very good for your sporting tackle.

Ted lingenmaters go well with lutefisk and lefse,I used to live in the Lefse Capital of the World.

Ghostrider, your yard looks a lot like mine. I have sun clothe over the tomatoes irrigate twice a day and they still go dormant for two or three months while the day temps are 100+. I get mine in early and eat tomatoes through May and early June and a smattering through the summer of small hard orangist tomatoes until the day temps drop into the 90s again. Last year my tomatoes were 6 feet tall in the fall and I picked untill Nov., but while we didn't have a freeze the temps were cold enough and the days short enough that they were starting to rot before fully ripening. I picked a bunch green and put them in paper bags in a dark closet and had tomatoes for another couple weeks.

Up in MN just before the freeze we would cut the plants at ground level and hang them upside down in the basement and the green tomatoes would continue to ripen.

We love BLTs but they just lose something with store bought tomatoes.

Growing tomatoes in the SW is a challenge, heat, spider mites and birds all fight you. Growing tomatoes in NW MN was a piece of cake compared to here.