Category: Food

I’ve grown heirloom tomatoes most of my life.  Now that I have a high tunnel, I’m not only looking for great taste, I’m looking for “well-adapted to life in a high tunnel.”  Kellogg’s Breakfast fits both requirements.

Taste

This is a large (1 to 2 pounds!) beautifully orange beefsteak tomato that tastes as good as it looks.  Although one of my chefs reports that she “never hides that color in a sandwich – the slice goes on the plate!” most reviewers slap a slice on their sandwiches for its nearly perfect sweet/acid balanced tomato flavor.

(Despite the name, ‘Kellogg’s Breakfast,’ I haven’t found anyone actually including the tomato as part of an Irish Breakfast, or any other breakfast dish. However, people do seem to love it in BLTs!)

Growing Characteristics

Kellogg’s Breakfast tomato is an indeterminate , regular leaf, large (need that leaf area to produce those beefsteak tomatoes!) plant which takes about 85 days to maturity. As beefsteaks go, it’s considered a mid-season producer with good yields that continue through the end of tomato season.

The stats are here.

High Tunnel Specifics

Plants are healthy and take trellising well. Disease resistance is good.

I was a little nervous about trellising a tomato plant whose fruits are 1 to 2 pounds each.  (The record is 2.7 pounds) However, those stems are strong!  Place a tomato trellis clip under the fruit bearing stem to support the tomato and in my experience, the stem holds onto that fruit! 

None of my fruits have developed green shoulders or suffered from sunscald.  The color is a deep, rich orange throughout the summer and into fall. (High tunnel tomato season ends at the beginning of October.) Yield (and quality) has been excellent throughout the season. Harvest before irrigating to prevent cracking.

Overall, Kellogg’s Breakfast plants thrive in the high tunnel. The tomatoes themselves look and taste great.  If you want beefsteaks in your high tunnel rotation, there’s no horticultural or flavor reason not to grow them.

History

Kellogg’s Breakfast doesn’t have the storied history of some traditional heirlooms (it was introduced to Seed Savers Exchange in 1993), but its flavor is so good that in the mid 2000s, it began winning nearly every tomato taste test/festival where it was entered which inspired heirloom seed houses to offer it, which encouraged tomato connoisseurs to grow it! 

The nitty-gritty particulars appear to be that Darrell Kellogg of Redford, MI, a railroad supervisor, found this tomato growing in his garden, liked it so much that he saved seed until it was stable, then gave seed to Bill Minkey of Darien, WI who introduced it to Seed Savers Exchange in 1993.  Bill then gave seed to Carolyn Male, who thought well of it and its popularity has continued to this day.  (Several sites have suggested that the original tomato was a West Virginia heirloom, but I have not been able to substantiate this claim.  DNA vegetable testing – it needs to be funded!)

Grow This Tomato In Your High Tunnel!

The quest to find heirloom tomatoes that do well in a high tunnel continues.  However, you can’t beat Kellogg’s Breakfast for flavor and adaptability to the high tunnel environment.  Yeah, it’s orange (bright orange!) and it can be a honking big tomato.  But it grows well enough that you can hand out samples and the taste will usually convince people to come back for more.

Today, after creating, planting and tending our asparagus field, here is our very first asparagus harvest!

We planted a half acre of Jersey Knight and Purple Passion asparagus in the Spring of 2013.  Like most perennials, asparagus can’t be harvested right away — it needs time to develop its root system.

That time was up this morning!  After walking the dogs and feeding the chickens, I grabbed my gear (pictured here) and went to the asparagus field.

Gear included a food-safe produce tote with ice at the bottom and a linen dishtowel to keep the asparagus cool after harvesting, a sharp knife and a plastic 6 inch ruler from the Republican Committee of Chester County that two friends gave me at a Phoenixville street festival.  Asparagus should be harvested at 6 inches long (and as short as 4 inches on a warm day) so having a flexible, yet sturdy ruler to quick check spear lengths was very helpful.

Harvesting asparagus means walking down the rows and looking for spears that are at least 4 inches tall.  Right now, everything is harvested, regardless of diameter, so the plant roots will put energy into making more spears, rather than leafing out the spears it had already put up.

After an hour and a half, here was the harvest:

The Purple Passion are easier to see.  Here’s how they cleaned up:

For the next four weeks, I’ll be walking the asparagus field every morning to see if there are any spears ready to harvest.  There is nothing better than fresh asparagus — I had raw asparagus for lunch and Frank munched on steamed asparagus for dinner.

Asparagus can be purchased at the farm — just contact me for details.

Meanwhile, here’s a completely gratuitous photo of the magnolia tree at the corner of our property.  Spring is really here!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In her later years, Frank’s mother grew gooseberries.  She wasn’t so sure that she liked them, so she’d pass them along to us and I’d make pies and fruit crisps from them.

Once we came to the farm, I had space to grow small fruits.  At a 2013 perennial plant swap, someone brought two ‘Pixwell’ gooseberry plants.  No one else wanted them, so I managed to score both of them when my numbers came up.

‘Pixwell” is the traditional American variety used in the unripe state to make pies and jam.  It looks like this on the plant:

Contrary to what most of the plant sale sites say, ‘Pixwell” has some NASTY thorns.  Harvesting from any gooseberry plant is a careful business.

“Pixwell’ may be the old standard, but it has not held up well in the small fruit press.  The variety is almost universally panned as “overly sour” and “tasteless” by garden writers.  Lee Reich, the upstate New York fruit expert (if you like fruit and he’s speaking, you want to attend his lectures!) outlines how to grow gooseberries here and like most fruit folks, vastly prefers the newer-to-the-US Finnish and Ukrainian varieties which are mildew-resistant (the biggest disease problem in gooseberries) and sweet enough to eat out of hand when ripe in late June.

The trend is to use the American varieties (like ‘Pixwell’) unripe for pies and jam and to let the European varieties ripen to eat fresh as “dessert gooseberries.”

All fine and good, but how “ripe” should an “unripe’ gooseberry be to make pies?

We have 4 American gooseberry bushes.  Since Memorial Day, I was getting a steady stream of emails, asking to buy our gooseberries.

Unfortunately, my mother-in-law is no longer with us, so I couldn’t ask her when she had harvested her gooseberries.  It’s considered bad form to experiement on your customers.  So, to answer the question “When is an unripe gooseberry ripe enough for pie?” I would have to make an actual gooseberry pie.

Sometimes farm work is so tough!

So, I went out and harvested the Pixwells.  They looked like this:

Gooseberries must be “topped and tailed” before they are cooked.  It’s time consuming to take the stem off the top end and the blossom-end “tail” which is another reason why some people just don’t want to bother with them.  As you can see from the photo, these gooseberries are in their light green “unripe” state.  ‘Pixwell’ gooseberries will turn light pink when ripe; other varieties will turn pink, purple or yellow, depending on the type.

Next, I needed a good pie recipe.

The currently popular gooseberry varities may be from Nordic and Eastern Europe, but the pies and jams made in the US are usually from British recipes.  When I need a traditional English recipe, I check out the BBC, which once again, did not disappoint.  Their gooseberry pie recipe is here.  What was fun about the BBC’s recipe is that it took port. However, I needed a little more instruction.  The Beekmans saved me with a great recipe here.

Both the BBC and the Beekmans agreed that gooseberries should be cooked before putting in the pie shell.  The filling ingredients are put in a saucepan and simmered until the goosberries “pop” which really does happen in under 10 minutes as shown in this photo:

While the filling cools, one pre-bakes the pie’s bottom crust.  Once the bottom crust and the filling are cool, one pours the filling into the bottom pie crust, then puts rounds (Beekmans) or strips (other recipes) of pie crust on top of the filling.  One then bakes the pie with a cookie sheet under it to catch drips (which will happen even with lots of space between the pie crust rounds or strips to let the steam out.  This is one goopy filling!
If one is the Beekmans, one’s pie looks perfect regardless (the advantange of staff!).  If one is me, who is a grower, rather than a baker, one’s pie looks a bit gloppy.  But to show you that everyone here really liked it, here’s a half-finished plate:

So, how ripe should an unripe gooseberry be for pie?  Personally, I love tart flavors, so I thought the pie was great.  But Cornell Univeristy’s write-up on gooseberries here suggests mid-June for making pies.  I think another 10 days on the plant will benefit the gooseberry flavor.

So, if you’d like to buy gooseberries for pies or jams, contact me June 18!  They should be perfect then!