Tomatoes with flavour

One of the great pleasures of kitchen gardening is access to tomatoes with taste. This is a pleasure that creeps up on one; months of careful work sowing seeds, raising and planting out seedlings, staking and endless tying and pruning of tomato vines suddenly bears fruit. Tomatoes redden and soften, then suddenly there is a glut and tomato bottling for sauces looms over the household.

Big ones, little ones, red ones, yellow ones – some of these tomatoes are eaten straight off the vine and never make the journey up to the kitchen. The smaller tomatoes are Golden Sunrise and Tommy Toe, with the bigger beefsteak tomatoes being Mortgage Lifter, Burpee’s Delicious and Oxheart (the cook’s favourite). Growing different varieties simultaneously hedges the gardener’s bets against failure. I’ve learnt not to be too greedy when planting out – tomatoes are the most labour-intensive of all the kitchen gardener’s crops. This year, aided by a mild summer, I’ve brought 36 vines through into the autumn harvest; they all stand taller than me, and I’m a big bloke!

And so, the gardener’s reward arrives. A simple moment of intense pleasure – a supper of tomato-on-toast with a little olive oil, herb salt and ground pepper, with a few basil leaves on the side for piquancy. Life’s good!

Eating a Sweet Siberian

Watermelon!This variety does not take too long to produce fruit. 80-85 days. It does not produce gigantic fruit. So, it is ideal if you don't want a monster of a melon clogging up your fridge. Or if you don't have an army to feed.

Bright green skin and yellow-fleshed. Very juicy, very sweet!

More on how to pickle cucumbers

While kitchen gardens produce fruit and vegetables, mature gardens also produce seeds. While many varieties of seeds are grown for planting out as next year’s crops, a more subtle reason for harvesting large quantities of particular seeds is to use them directly in the kitchen for culinary flavouring.

Once cucumbers suitable for pickling have been grown and harvested, they can be bottled in wide-mouthed jars, either whole or sliced, in salt water (16g per litre of pure water) and (optionally) a tablespoon of whey per jar (from natural yogurt) . Then the seeds are added for flavour – coriander, dill, mustard and fennel. Cover with raspberry or vine leaves and weigh these down with glass marbles to keep the cucumbers submerged. Store in a cool dark place for eating over the following year until the next crop of cucumbers is ready for harvest.

When gardeners and cooks get together

There will be plenty of produce from the garden that ends up on the table.
All kinds of salads and side dishes, accompaniments, main dishes, herbal concoctions, laughter.The table ended up too small for all the bowls and platters, so we had to have a sideboard laden with dishes, too. Sorry, no picture of the sideboard.

Cucumbers for pickling and salads

Some of last year’s pickled cucumbers (made from Lebanese slicing cucumbers) were less-than-ordinary; if you are going to go to the trouble of bottling your summer crop for winter consumption, then growing the right sort of cucumber in the first place is a good start.

Yet sliced cucumbers are an important part of our summer salads, so a cucumber that can do double-duty for slicing AND bottling is something worth looking out for...

The cucumber shown in the photo below is called ‘Muncher Burpless’, grown from non-hybrid, old traditional open-pollinated seeds from Eden Seeds in Lower Beechmont in Queensland. The same length as the teaspoon below them, these small cucumbers have a slightly thicker and rougher skin than standard salad cucumbers.

Here’s what the packet says:

Cucumber: Summer salad vegetable, known to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Likes rich well drained soil, though not heavily fertilised. Keep moist. Shallow roots damaged with cultivation. Sow after frost.

Muncher Burpless – tender burpless slicing variety, 17cm long, smooth bitterness-free green skin, can be used for pickles also. Resistance to mosaic virus. 65 days.

We are harvesting these cucumbers daily, and have bottled the surplus. Being small, there is no need to peel or slice them before putting them into wide-mouthed pickling jars. When peeled and used in salads, the taste is indeed smooth and free of bitterness, just as the packet proclaims.