25 Things I Love About LA #4 - Tomatomania

Last weekend was the annual Tomatomania sale at the Tapia Brothers Farm Stand in Encino. It's the fourth year Noah and I have gone and we always end up buying more plants than we have room for in our backyard container garden. And yet, we've managed to find a way...
Above are our tomato choices, twelve in all, as well as some basil. We grabbed strawberry plants later, too. A quick list of our tomatoes, from memory - Siberia, Pineapple, Reisentraube, Enchanted, Indian Moon, Bi-Color Cherry, Matt's Gold Cherry, Black Krim, Black Truffle (a hybrid of the Black Trifele, which we grew with moderate success last year), Chocolate Stripe, Copia and Costoluto Genovese. Holy crap, I can't believe I remembered them all. Okay, Noah remembered that last one.
The tomatoes they sell are like 99% heirlooms, with some old standbys like Early Girls and Best Boys thrown in for the non-adventurous. Which always confuses me - if you're at a huge, well known heirloom tomato event with hundreds of tasty varieties, why the hell do you buy the ones you can get at Home Depot?

You can see how many flats they have filled with seedlings. The picture above is about 1/5 of the entire sale area. The only variety we really wanted and couldn't find this year was Northern Lights. It's a great yellow/orange beefsteak with red stripes that was a prolific plant for us a few years back.
The farm stand only hosts the event, but sells it's own fruits, flowers and plants and is a pretty cool place. They've expanded their chicken coop (above) and you get the pleasure of listening to the chickens cluck away while you shop. It's great fun and makes me yearn for my own urban chicken coop. I love this little farm that's only 20 minutes from the heart of Hollywood
But it's not just us lucky Angelenos that get to attend Tomatomania events. The company does a variety of events in California and back east in Lothian, MD and Litchfield, CT. Dates are below. And whether you get your tomatoes there or from your local nursery or on the internet from places like Seed Savers, it's time to start looking. SPRING IS HERE!

Fillmore, CA *NEW

April 4 Only Otto and Sons Nursery

Beverly Hills, CA

April 18 PartyPaperLife

Sonoma, CA

April 25 - 26 Cornerstone Place

Arcadia, CA

May 1 - 3 LA Garden Show

Lothian, MD *NEW

May 8 - 10 Greenstreet Gardens

Litchfield, CT

May 15 - 17 White Flower Farm

Transitioning the Garden

Lots of stuff going on in the garden right now. First off I walked out a few days ago and found the above guy growing. My first sunflower! I've been planting sunflower seeds for years to no avail. And just when I'm about to give up/run out of seeds I finally get one. Woop woop!

And there's also this melon:

He(?) (Do melons have genders?) just showed up out of nowhere when we first did our summer plantings back at the end of March. We had no idea what he was going to be, since melons look kind of like cucumbers and we eat/compost lots of them. Squash was an option, too. But apparently it's a melon. Anybody have a clue as to type? Guess we'll find out when we finally cut him open.

It's also time for the last of the summer tomatoes. Like this honkin' Marmande:


We had zero Marmandes for months, then we got three. But somebody (our back neighbor, we suspect) stole both of them just as they were hitting their peak of ripeness! You have not met two more bitter gardeners when Noah and I discovered that tragedy. This one is finally ready (the pic is about a week old, I picked an almost fully red tomato this evening, before it got stolen).

And the Riesentraubes! Oh, the Riesentraubes... how I love thee. You just keep giving and giving and I know you'll do so up through October and into November. Check these pretties out:

They're great for roasting whole with some eggplant (as I did with the eggplants from the Farmers Market on Sunday night) in olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic.

But this weekend it was time to start buying and planting the fall/winter garden. It'll be our first non-summer garden and I'm kinda psyched. I picked out two kinds of Brussel sprouts, purple asparagus (which Jimmy the Plant Dude assured me are so awesome you can eat raw) and some scallions.

I still want to plant some spinach (gotta wait 'til it's a little more consistently cool during the days), lettuces, maybe a butternut squash. I put in some dumpling squashes about a month ago. Maybe I'll get kale and chard, if there's room. I've got a Black Krim tomato going that I planted about a month ago, he'll be our winter tomato. One of the awesome things about living in LA, you can get tomatoes nearly year round if you're strategic in your planting.

Any other suggestions?

Here's to Volunteers

Photo: Debra Pearlman

Last summer I put one cherry tomato plant in the ground next to my house. Last fall I put a deck on my house and added planter boxes where the tomato had been. This summer, the cherry tomato volunteered in my garden, and as you can see, it has overtaken my porch, flower bed, and is over the roof of my house. So here's to volunteers!

Tomatoes & Nectarines - Who Knew?

So a couple of weekends ago, Noah and I had a late and lovely dinner with our friends Craig & Sharra at Cube on La Brea. As per usual we ordered waaaaay too much, especially in the starters category.

One of the tasty appetizers we got was a peach, tomato and buffalo mozzarella salad, drizzled in balsamic and topped with freshly chopped basil. It was such a nice twist on the fairly played out caprese you find on every Cal/Ital/Med menu in town.

It was so good, and so easy that I knew I'd be recreating it at home. And I totally planned on making it this Sunday to eat while I watched the Federer match (yay, Rog!). But, um, Noah and I were out late on Saturday and we pretty much slept through the Farmers Market this week. So no peaches or freshly made mozzarella for us. Thankfully, inspiration struck and saved me from a snack of... nothing.

We always have a few tomatoes on the counter in the summer months, fresh from the garden, and this Sunday was no different. So I grabbed a nice Paul Robeson and then checked out the fruit situation. There was a juicy looking nectarine. Score. I've always liked nectarines better than peaches (I have texture issues with the fuzziness) so it seemed win-win por moi. Sadly the only cheese we had was some cave aged Gouda which really did not fit the bill. Tomatoes and nectarines it was!

I sliced the tomatoes and then the nectarines into rounds and arranged them on a platter and drizzled them both with some balsamic. I admit, it's the $4.99 kind from TJ's. I totally need to up my foodie street cred and get some good stuff, but... well I'm kinda lazy. I finished it off by chiffonading up some Genovese basil from the garden and sprinkled it over the rows.

Then it was time to chow down! And it was awesome. Give it a try and I think you'll like it just as much as I did.

Especially if you actually have the fresh mozzarella to complete the dish.