This year, we bought many of the same kinds of plants that worked for us last year: banana peppers, habaneros, jalapenos, green peppers, zucchini and yellow squash. We tried a different variety of eggplant, with awful results. We planted tons of lettuce, spinach, carrots, cucumbers and green bean (which never made beans this year, largely because of the onslaught of Japanese beetles, I'm guessing.)
But mostly we planted tomatoes. Six plants. In the space that four lived in last year. Plus two roma plants we kept in containers until they got too big to live (and a wonderful cream of roasted tomato soup was had when the plants were sacrificed to the compost pile, let me tell you.)
We started the season the last weekend in June with an almost-ripe beauty silced and eaten by itself on a Sunday night (only almost ripe because I work nights and my husband works days, but neither of us was willing to let the other eat the first tomato of the season alone.)
Since then, it's been a steady stream of red beauties. We've long since stopped trying to figure out which tomatoes came from which plant, as they've all grown together (at least it cuts down on the weeding.)
I guess you could say tomatoes have been on my mind, as well as my plate, so as I contemplated a topic for this month I went over to Food Reference.com to see what it had to say about this versatile fruit.
This is a great, if somewhat busy, site full of food facts, trivia, quotes, games, tips and news about all sorts of food topics. Under the Kitchen Tips section, I found that tomatoes are rich in vitamin C, lycopine and beta carotene and have been linked to a decreased risk of prostate cancer.
They should be stored and served at room temperature (unless they're still warm from the sun, which is my favorite way to eat them) and can be used for everything from salsa to tomato sauce to a sandwich condiment.
The trivia section tells us that the first tomatoes were cultivated in Greece in the 1800s, but I don't believe them. According to the food timeline they first appeared in Europe in the 1500s, and of course they came from Mexico before that. (Incidentally, the above-mentioned page has lots of good information on the history of tomato eating.)
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