I will be heading to Charlottesville to speak at the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello on Sept. 6 and 7. It would be so wonderful if I could bring some of the released new Dwarf tomatoes from our project so we could include them in the tomato tasting (sadly, all of my tomatoes are long gone!). If anyone nearby thinks they may have any ripe Dwarf tomatoes available around Sept 4 or 5, please email me - I'd love to find a way to get some from you!

Not much else to report - we continue to enjoy eggplant and hot and sweet peppers, and badly miss our tomatoes. In addition to prepping for Monticello, I am wrapping up the season - finishing up documentation, labeling pictures, and packaging up saved seeds (of which I have an awful lot!).

Work on final edits for the book will probably begin soon....I am ready for email requests for changes and additions from Storey.  

Final note - I am sad to report that Zely and Ritz, the wonderful Glenwood Avenue restaurant that hosted superb tomato dinners for the last 6 years, decided to close its doors. My fond memories of those dinners, as well as my friendship with Sarig and Nancy, will last forever.

I've been meaning to do this update...but stuff gets in the way (trips to visit family, painting interior rooms, playing Words with Friends with friends!).  Better late than never!  The tomatoes are all gone, but the peppers and eggplant soldier on, with no end in sight!  All of the following are growing in 5 gallon black plastic grow bags purchased from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply.

The list of pepper names follows the picture gallery, below.

Top row:  World Beater, Yellow Corno di Toro, Amethyst
next row: Amethyst (different seed lot), Bulgarian Carrot, Candy Corn
next row:  Candy corn (second plant), Chervena, Chiltepine (cross, purple stem)
next:  Chocolate Bell, Corno di Toro, Cubanelle
next:  Dukes hot (cross, purple stem), Eclipse, Etna
next:  Fire Opal, Fish, Garden Sunshine
next:  Gemstone, Golden Marconi, Kalman Hungarian
next:  Lollipops, Long Red Cayenne, Marconi
Next:  Marconi (cross, purple stem), Oda, Orange Bell
next:  Padron, Pinata, Pretty Purple (crossed, lavender rather than black fruit)
next:  Red Belgium, Royal Purple, Royal Purple (different plant)
next:  Royal Purple (different plant), Serrano (cross, purple stem), Sunrise
next:  Sunset, Takanatsume, Thai Dragon
next:  Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, Vacquero, Vietnamese Multicolor

I had a nice chat about heirloom tomatoes (and, specifically, the history of Cherokee Purple) with Eliza Barclay, who writes for the NPR (National Public Radio) food blog called "the salt". The article can be found here. The Cherokee Purple story just highlights the relevance of finding out as much as we can about tomato varieties while those who send them to us are still available to speak to. And, even though I spoke quite often to J. D. Green, the man who shared the seeds with me back in 1990, even his knowledge of the variety was very limited.

It is one of the most frustrating parts of the heirloom pursuit; realizing that there is always more you would like to know, but finding more dead ends than not. To this day, I wish I had a chance to speak to Robert Richardson and Lillian Bruce to see if there was more to know about Lillian's Yellow Heirloom; or with Archie Hook to quiz him more on Hugh's - and there are so many other examples.

It really is just genealogy, only concerning the lineage of plants and varieties instead of relatives. So much goes unexplored, unasked, or unsaid, until we realize that it is too late.

As I head out to the driveway to pick ripe (meaning ready for seed saving) eggplant and peppers, it is nice to reflect back on the past few days spent in Florida visiting my brother Kent and his family, and my mom. Our family is very small and very scattered, so it is so important to find opportunities to connect. The trip reinforced how much we have in common (our rather silly sense of humor, which produced many groans from my nieces Devin and Olivia and his wife April!). My mom has been in an assisted living facility there since my dad's passing in 2007, which is challenging for Kent and his family. I got to spend some hours each day with her, and I know I got a lot out of it, and hope that she did as well.

It was a wonderful visit that passed by way too quickly. The warm hospitality and generosity from Kent and April were wonderful and deeply appreciated. My mom even gave me a call last night....quite a rarity lately....and we have a brief but nice chat. 

So, it is back to the to do list of gardening tasks - wrapping up things (meaning all seed saving, harvesting, consuming and preserving from the many eggplant and peppers), preparation for Monticello, Southern Season and Eno talks, and handling requests for book edits and refinements as they start to come in (which I expect to be soon).

Once again I am reminded about how quickly time passes when one has a garden. From the January planning to the August (and later) harvesting, the next one always seems just around the corner!

It is so depressing to contemplate the coming months without tomatoes. Aside from some productive Sungold plants in our dirt garden (and a large buck who doesn't seem to care much about our water scarecrows, busily devouring much of the rear of that garden), we are about to be tomato-less.  

Peppers are ripening quickly - later tonight I hope to show an array of the plants loaded with fruit...eggplant as well.

Outreach NC has an article on my gardening efforts - I've not seen/read it yet (my wife saw it today in her travels) - the pictures are up and on line here, and the article is here, on page 40 of the link. That was then....it looks very different now (which you will see a bit later on tonight!).

My wife watched me walk out the door in my soon-to-be-disgusting "garden clothes" (the ones with the permanent stains from tomato vines and dirt). "Are you really going out there in this heat and humidity"?

You bet I did!  There is nothing better than taking the 30 minutes needed for the personal pep talk - the garden awaits, work needs to be done, and there is no time like the present!  So, after nearly 4 hours in the muck, the transformation is complete.  Where once stood rows of dwarf tomatoes, followed by tightly packed rows of peppers and eggplant, is now a far more breathable and organized array of just peppers and eggplant. All have been repositioned, restaked, assessed, deeply watered - and they are now ready to be photographed, picked and seed saved.  I do want to get a good feeding on all of the plants, since they are all primed to yield very heavily up to frost.

It is now painting time (no, no ladders today), but hopefully a bit later I will travel out to the driveway with my camera and shoot some definitive shots of some of the varieties. They are all at their most photogenic and attractive, and there are some surprises (as always). Mostly, there is some good eating out there - either roasted, grilled, sauteed, or dehydrated in preparation for making superb paprika.

The tomatoes in the big dirt garden are actually to trickle in - we've had some wonderful Cherokee Purple and Chocolate, and a few of the dwarfs as well. We've even got flowers on some late planted beans and squash and cukes. This is when it is harder to find the energy, but it must be found - there is so much more of the season to go!

Happy  Sunday, all! Watch for pictures (or videos, perhaps) in the coming days.