BY BEA WESTERBERG

“Don’t keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone….Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you never saw before”. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the first practical telephone in 1876.

Maybe that is why I feel totally okay with getting a car that does not fit my age bracket. I am getting a lot better at shifting and it was much better to put in gas in Hastings at $3.74 for premium than it was up in the middle of the woods where it was $5.19. I did not do a complete fill up with the $5.19 gas. I knew we have our little touch of heaven here in Hastings with supposedly the lowest gas prices in the state.

That wonderful liquid rain has blessed us several times to help out our trusty plants. The hail could have been optional but it had to be dumped somewhere. A number of hail damaged vehicles from the hail event of several months back are still waiting to get into the backed up repair shops.

The rain has been good to our garden crops and hopefully they will give us their best. The sweet corn has been yummy and now the tomatoes are getting serious about producing for us. Home grown tomatoes are one of the best things we can enjoy. (Maybe we would say the same thing about bananas if we were able to grow them here). My 2 tomato plants under the windmill are thinking about being ready but in the mean time, the Farm Market has been my supplier for the BLTs and stuffed grilled cheese sandwiches. I have also made one batch of Martha Stewart’s pasta where everything is put together, water added and then boiled. It is a bit different than cooking and draining the pasta and then putting the hot pasta sauce on it. The first time I tried it, I was sure I was going to be making soup, but it all turned out very good. Oh, that reminds me, I can also do some fresh tomato soup which also beats the canned varieties. It must also have fresh basil to be the real deal.

I am often asked what is my favorite tomato. That is very hard to answer as there are thousands of varieties of them and a huge range of colors, shapes and sizes. Some of the really black tomatoes and also one of the kinds that is ripe when it’s green have made it to the top of my list. It is also hard to beat those 2 pound beefsteak heirlooms at room temperate with a dash of sea salt. Over the years, when we were in totally crazy tomato production, I probably grew over 500 different kinds and maybe there was a small handful of cherry types that I would say I would not grow again.

The tomatoes are divided into two different camps. There is the “hybrid” which has gone through a breeding process to get certain traits from open pollinated tomatoes. The hybrid seeds will produce true on the first planting, but will most likely fall back more and more to their original families in later plantings. Generally you do not save the seed from hybrids for future plantings. This means the seed will have to purchased each time you want to grow that type of tomato. The one great thing about hybrids is that a lot of disease protection can be packaged in it. There is a lot of letter combinations on the seed packages so you need to know those codes to know what protection you are getting. Just call on Google for answers.

“Open pollinated” tomatoes repeat themselves forever and their seeds can be saved and reused year after year. I find that this is where you can get some of the really juicy tomatoes that let the juice run down your elbows. However, they are often not as easy or dependable to grow. The term “heirloom” means it’s an open pollinated tomato that has been around for 50 years or more. If you are planning on doing future garden production in response to food shortages, you will need open pollinated and/or heirloom seeds. Enjoy the gifts of summer heat and rain.