Another good garden season is over. 

Another year full of learning and growth winds down. 

The garden is asleep under its blanket of mulch and leaves and now it is time to reflect on what worked and what needs to be tweaked. 

Back to the charts and lists and hastily scribbled notes, left here and there, when soil stained hands marked paper with ink and earth in an attempt to catalogue and categorize scent and taste and beauty. 

The 2021 Potager had a few main headings that most of the produce can fit under. 

• Tomatoes

• Peppers

• Greens

• Basil

• Beets

• Beans

• This and that

We were very pleased, for the most part, with this year’s choices. There were several really wonderful surprises from the seed share and some new varieties that we tried. Also a couple major flops. 

We had extraordinary success with eggplants and cucamelons compared to last year. The beets, however, were a major disaster being eaten by something before I could harvest them. Oh well, every year is different and unique in what works and what grows and what gets eaten by some new visitor we hadn’t expected. 

So, let's dive in. 

Tomatoes

The tomatoes had some wonderful, delicious moments and some “how can you be so beautiful and taste like nothing?” moments. 

This year's tomatoes were:

Chocolate Pear cherry

Indigo Rose cherry

Kryptonite Tomato 

Paul Robeson beefsteak

Pruden's Purple beefsteak

Steakhouse cherry

Velvet Red cherry

Yagodka cherry

Yellow Furry Tomato 

We decided to try all new (to us) varieties this year and quite a few were from the seed swap so that helped in trying out some really unique varieties that I may not have bought otherwise. 

Last year we tried 3 varieties of cherry tomato and found them perfect for snacking, eating and preserving. The flavors are so intense and concentrated that they made much more intense salsa and sauce. Plus they were awesome for the jam and conserves that I made.

This year we decided to try several new cherry tomato varieties, but also include some beefsteaks that people raved about, flavorwise. We’re very much pro-flavor around here, regardless of size or looks. 

I’ve already written up the specifics of each variety in April of this year (follow the links in the last paragraph), so this is purely a how-they-grew and how-they-taste description.

1. Chocolate Pear Cherry

Very pleased with the growth and production of these tomatoes. 

I didn’t have a lot of room left in the garden so I started 6 plants and they mostly survived the surprise decapitations by groundhogs and the late frost we had after they were planted out. 

In comparison to last year's Black Cherry they were about the same color. They didn’t grow as high, or as vigorously and I wouldn’t say that the flavor was better or worse. 

I think the main reason to grow these, instead of the Black Cherry, was if you wanted different shapes in your tomato basket. 

Growth: ⅘

Production:⅘

Flavor: ⅘

Interest:⅘

2. Indigo Rose

I had such high hopes for these tomatoes. The pictures that I saw of them were so beautiful, and the high anthocyanins were a bonus, but we didn’t find they tasted like much.

I intend to grow them again next year and try to get them more sunshine. When I had done my research I planned out the tomatoes based on their final height so these guys were at the back of the garden so as not to shade anything out in front. The problem with my plan was that the majority of the tomatoes were only about three feet off the ground and were shaded out by the peppers in front of them. This made it take forever for them to ripen and possibly that’s why they didn’t have much flavor. Next year they will be at the front in as much sunshine as I can give them and we’ll see how they do. 

Growth:⅗

Production: ⅘

Flavor: ⅗

Interest: 5/5

3. Kryptonite

These were some of the seed swap tomatoes and I only planted 4 to try them out. The pictures I found of them looked amazing.

In the shuffle of hardening off quite a few tomatoes lost their markers (always write it on the pot itself if you can so it can’t get lost!) and so I wasn’t entirely sure who was who. We did end up finding 2 seedlings that we thought were them and planted them against an arbor at the end of the Paul Robeson patch. 

They didn’t really grow and they didn’t really ripen so our experience with them wasn’t the best. Not sure if it was the location or the seeds?

Growth:2/5

Production:2/5

Flavor:?

Interest:?

Tomorrow we’ll continue with three more of the tomatoes we grew this year.