I borrowed The Pioneer Woman's cookbook from a friend. Surely you know the Pioneer Woman. She is THE blogger of the Midwest USA. She's lovable, funny, normal, inspirational...need I go on? The funny thing is - she's pretty much like me, except I never lived on a ranch and no longer live on a farm. We have the same tips, tricks and a lot of our recipes are spot on. Which is crazy to see some of my recipes in her book. Not that she copied them from me or stole them. She doesn't even know me, but it's just crazy seeing stuff I know how to do and regularly fix in print. I was reading her cookbook, because evidentally she completely understands that a lot of women read cookbooks, not just pick out recipes. Anyway, she has a rather funny tomato story about an overabundance of yellow tear drop tomatoes due to the nursery mismarking tomatoes. This has happened to me. It wasn't tear drops, it was cherry tomatoes. My friend Debi picked up tomato plants from Lowes last spring and out of the 42 tomato plants, more than half were mismarked and ended up being cherry tomatoes. Thankfully, we had five hungry children on a regular basis. Except for the oldest one, he's sorta picky. But we'd pick bowls of cherry tomatoes, then totes of cherry tomatoes. Towards the end, we didn't even pick cherry tomatoes - if the kids didn't pick them off to snack on them - they didn't get picked. We still ended up with a successful garden, processing well over 100 quarts of tomatoes for the winter. It didn't take long to go through them, but it made many delicious sauces. It just cracks me up that someone like the Pioneer Woman does have a real life - just like mine. Just like a lot of ours. The funny thing is what Ree Drummond (Pioneer Woman) took from the experience was to buy from multiple nurseries.
What did I take from the experience? With the prompting of Debi, we purchased organic heirloom seeds, made our own seedling pots from newspapers and water daily. Why didn't I think of multiple nurseries?! At least I could've had a nice 6 month break from gardening. Instead I'll be watering and taking care of plants for most of a year - we planted in February. But, if a disease should come and wipe out all genetically altered tomato plants then I guess I'll be the go-to girl with the old fashioned plants. Oh joy. Blessings.
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