Neighbor With Garden - LIkes to Share

Our next door neighbor when I was growing up owned the lot behind his house. He was an engineer for the Southern Railroad, but had grown up in north Georgia in the country and was an able gardener in his spare time. Mr. Lingerfelt’s lot was at least a half acre in size, set in the suburban Atlanta subdivision where we lived, and on it he grew fine tomatoes, squash, corn, and okra in the summer and various greens in the fall. He’d load up a basket and bring it to the back door and offer them to my mother for a few dollars he used to help support his large garden and large family. You couldn’t get much fresher than Mr. Lingerfelt’s vegetables, and we enjoyed them for as long as my parents lived in that house. He even brought over a squirrel stew once, not to sell, just for them to taste. That, my mother turned down.


Here in Aiken, our next door neighbor, Wade Brodie, is equally generous with the bounty from his garden in the country east of town. He reminds us through the summer that there are tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers out back, sometimes still on his truck, and we can help ourselves. Occasionally, Sissy, Wade’s wife, brings a jar of her famous gazpacho, the perfect meal for a hot August night.

A few months ago Wade called with an offer of scuppernong juice, ready to be made into jelly, and last week came the greatest gift – a huge bag of collard greens he and Sissy had picked that day. I suppose they knew their citified neighbors well enough to know that, even if we had the inclination to wash those collards – and it takes, I’m told a great deal of washing – we probably weren’t up to the task and would wind up with a pot full of greens and South Carolina grit. So, he brought them washed and chopped and ready to go in the pot. It beats squirrel stew any day.

Mr. Wade’s collards and Mr. Lingerfelt’s turnip greens all belong to a large family of vegetables called Cruciferae, which gets its name from its four-petaled flower that looks like a crucifer or cross. This clan also includes arugula, bok choy, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, kale, mustard, and radishes.

Collards are a form of a variety of cabbage called kale. The leaves are thick and rather rounded like cabbage, while kale has leaves that are usually curly and often finely divided. Turnip green leaves are less dense, more elongated and have an edible root called, of course, a “turnip.”


Collards and turnip greens have been discovered by the foodies lately and some of my favorite cookbooks have recipes for them. Donald Barickman’s “Magnolia’s Down South - Uptown/Downtown Southern Cuisine” from his famous East Bay Street restaurant in Charleston ( I saw Oprah there once), recommends cooking collards with a little onion and garlic and olive oil, cider vinegar, lots of chicken broth and a ham hock or neck bones – “till the greens have a good flavor and are silky in texture.” Silky collards – who’d have thought it? I put in a little sugar too.

My gardening neighbor and mentor Judy shared her gardening space with me this summer. Out behind our houses, it’s the only sunny spot available to both of us. She planted tomatoes, some okra, and green beans, and I planted lots of basil, a row of zucchini and yellow squash and, rather as an afterthought, three ichiban eggplants.

The tomatoes are played out now. The squash is turned under. The basil and okra and bush beans have been replaced by Judy’s sweet peas and spinach and some broccoli she started from some heritage seeds she found at a farmer’s market this summer. The eggplant, however, plays on. It is even sort of pretty, as vegetables can be when they’re healthy.

Ichiban seems less bitter than big old eggplants we’re used to, and the long narrow body, peeled, hollowed out a little, and dipped in flour, beaten egg, and breadcrumbs, make a perfect little boat for the seafood and sauce that go into Eggplant Bayou Teche, the tastiest Cajun dish I’ve ever eaten. It’s also the most time consuming, but you can get it at VZ’s Big Easy now in Aiken.

I looked the other day to see if Mr. Lingerfelt was still living in our old neighborhood, and found he’d died just a few months ago, still living in the house where he’d been for over fifty years. There was his picture, grinning, with a big cigar on one side of his mouth. The obituary even mentioned the half acre garden I remembered, and I found a google earth shot of it, probably taken in spring or early summer. There it was - that red Georgia clay, surely enriched by now from constant tending, fresh plowed, looking ready for the first summer crop of tomatoes and squash.

I hope another gardener buys his home and his garden. What a great selling point for the houses around him, and around the Brodies and around my friend Judy - “Neighbor with garden – likes to share.”

It's A Sure Sign That School's Starting...

when every other recycling bin holds a box for a laptop. Dell, HP, Toshiba, and Apple boxes sit on top of beer and Diet Coke cans and newspapers that line the Tuesday morning walking circuit for Bell and me.

And with the beginning of school comes the end of summer. We’re back from the beach - Isle of Palms, South Carolina, having waited until the last possible week to rent a house, in case David chose to go to summer school. It gives you something to look forward to, we say, and it’s cheaper then sometimes, the week before school starts.

After last year’s disastrous rental, with dangerously loose porch pickets and a fraternity house floor, where, in the words of my sister-in-law, Kathy, “The three second rule did not apply,” I was determined to upgrade. And so we did - to a rather grand, for us, six bedroom affair with an impressive collection of TV sets and dvd players, cable – stuff you really don’t need at the beach, but the all important view of the Atlantic.

It was a far cry from the 70’s houses we used to rent, with no air conditioning, no telephone, no television, no washer and dryer or dishwasher, sometimes a few rows back from ocean front, where the only breezes came from the box fans we squeezed in the car.

But nothing is too good for the newest addition to our beach crew, Lauren Elizabeth, now nearly two months old, who probably wouldn’t have minded one of those 70’s houses. She looks like her brothers, only softer. “I want her to learn to put herself to sleep,” her mother says, “please try not to let her go to sleep in your lap.” - pretty stiff demands for a granny who’s finally got a chance to hold a baby girl after a host of boy children. I tried my best. “It’s OK, my mom does it too,” says Lauren’s mama, by way of forgiveness.

The weather was good – not as suffocatingly hot as you might expect for mid-August. A couple of rainy mornings came and we were off to the Fire Museum in North Charleston – a good place for our two preschoolers to get their fill of fire trucks, then to the Children’s Museum downtown, near the Visitors’ Center, where I think, at least a million children had chosen to spend their last day of freedom before school starts.

Three-year-old Elliot decided this was his year to ride in the boat and go fishing. He caught the most – five baby sharks, but got away from his quarry as fast as he could once they got reeled in.

Hank and I will have been married forty years this weekend - if you see him, suggest something sparkly. David surprised us with a digital copy he’d made of the tapes we sent back and forth when Hank was in Vietnam in the very early 70’s, the first time we’d heard them in all that time. It is a great gift to be able to hear ourselves at the beginning, to hear our early plans, some that turned out and some that didn’t, to hear that some of the things we argue about and worry about haven’t changed much in forty years. We were more polite to each other then, and our voices were a little higher. I sounded a little more redneck, (though I may still sound redneck, it’s hard to shed Georgia cracker, I think).

We came home to a lush, green garden, some ripe tomatoes, four ichiban eggplants, and a brand new crop of weeds. We’ll take care of them, I expect, while we begin thinking about fall planting, and also - next summer’s beach trip.

Blaze Away Aiken!

“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! … A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock.” Author and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau would be happy in Aiken I think. Aiken is Blazing Away, as the man says, with autumn color. The Maples, first in his list of necessary trees, have made a breathtaking appearance this season.

Maples belong to the genus Acer, a word that comes from a Latin word meaning “sharp,” since most of the maples have pointed leaves. There are many handsome maples, and, many are quite happy in our Aiken soil and climate. Maples are deciduous trees grown for shade and color and, in the case of the northern grown sugar maple (Acer saccharum) for the syrup made from their sap. The wood of maple is sometimes used in furniture, and the neck of a Fender Stratocaster Electric guitar is also made of maple wood.

The fruit of a maple tree is a winged seed called a “samara,” or commonly called a “key.” These little whirlybirds are fun to watch and are attractive to wildlife, and very likely were your first exposure to the science lesson of how seeds are spread by nature.

There are four species of maple tree adapted to all areas of South Carolina, according to the Clemson extension. Red maple (Acer rubrum), Japanese maple (A. palmatum), southern sugar maple (A. barbatum) and chalkbark maple (A. leucoderme) are fairly easy to grow. Bob McCartney of Woodlanders Nursery tells me that the northern grown sugar maple grows well here too.

The ideal soil for most maples is rich, porous and well-drained. Most do well in a fairly wide soil pH range, although many favor slightly acid soil. Red and silver maples thrive in fairly wet soils. Some maples tolerate moderate drought. Most thrive in full sun or partial shade. Some should be protected from the sun to prevent leaf scorch and provided irrigation.

Japanese Maples trees come in a great range of sizes, from under six feet to 40 or 50 feet tall. They are slow growers, but we don’t mind, because the leaves, which can be narrowly or broadly dissected, are so exquisite in color and form, sometimes arching and spreading gracefully down, other times projecting up, that we take them anyway they come.

Some Japanese Maples have red foliage in the spring as new leaves emerge, change to green in summer and run red again in the fall. Others emerge green and remain so until fall, when they become a showy copper, orange, red or yellow. The Japanese Maple can be used as a small lawn specimen, an accent plant, a patio tree, a container plant, or in grouping.

Be sure to plant a Japanese Maple in dappled shade, as direct sunlight may scorch the leaves in summer. Too much shade, Clemson warns, may cause the tree to grow more slowly and purple leaves to become more green. Prune in late summer or early fall and prune only branches or trunks that rub against each other. Once established, keep pruning to a minimum.

A non-dissected leaf of a Japanese maple looks sort of like a hand with fingers. Cultivars in the Non-dissected group are “Bloodgood’ and the slightly smaller, ‘Burgundy Lace.’
A dissected leaf has narrow cut leaves. Those in the dissected group are lower growing (8 to 10 feet) and include ‘Crimson queen,’ ‘Waterfall,’ and ‘Inaba Shidare.’

We can spot another maple species – the Red Maples, in spring, while driving around the highways of South Carolina, by the showy red clusters of flowers that sprout on the branches in early spring.

Plant your red maple in moist, slightly acidic, fertile soil. It likes partial shade but will also thrive in full sun. Clemson mentions ‘Columnare,’ ‘October Glory,’ and ‘Autumn Flame’ as good cultivars. Woodlanders Nursery offers an unusual variety called ‘Candy Ice’ with variegated leaves. Cold Creek also carries Red Maples.

The Southern Sugar Maple (Acer barbatum - AKA Acer floridanum), like the ones growing on York Street in front of Wade and Sissy Brodie’s are large trees that show off their spectacular yellow color this time of year. The three trees also have a job to do in summer. Planted on the west side of the Brodie’s house, next to the street, they provide shade from the hottest summer sun. Woodlanders also carries these.

I’ve read that the yankee version of the Sugar Maple, Acer saccharum, doesn’t perform well in these parts, but if you’ve ridden by the Aiken Standard Building in the last week or two, you’d have to disagree. Those Sugar Maples, Acer saccharum, have put on a dazzling display this year. I don’t know if the folks at the Standard have tried harvesting syrup from the tree, but theoretically, at least, they could.

That Sugar Maple is a large tree, slow growing and long lived. The leaf colors range from yellow to orange and red with attractive pale yellow flowers in the spring. Plant your sugar maple in fertile, moist, slightly acidic, well-drained soil.

If you ever wonder why you like living in Aiken, drive around town this weekend and see just what a beautiful town in is. Thoreau would have to admit that it is, indeed, complete.

While you’re out, don’t miss “St.Thaddeus Creates” this Saturday and Sunday in the church gym. There will be lots of handcrafted items, all ready for Christmas, and part of the earnings go to local outreach projects and to Mead Hall.

This is the last weekend of summer, 2008

We know it by the calendar, but our senses also hint that season is winding down. The sunlight falls at a different angle through the kitchen window, the Chessers’ dogwood is sporting its first blush of red, and the birds are quieter, their chirps replaced by the occasional pop of a wisteria seedpod setting seeds for spring. And, best of all, it is blessedly, blissfully cool.

One of best things about writing a garden column in a small town is the contact it gives you with lots of people – people you see often and people you’ve never met. They call you and invite you to come by and look at their unusual plants, or send you a photo by email or snail mail.

The past few weeks yielded a bumper crop of those kinds of contacts. One call came from New Ellenton. Like me, June Cofer is a plant collector. Less concerned with design and more interested in finding interesting plants, she and her husband have a huge garden filled partly with vegetables – she was harvesting the last of the peas when I arrived – and partly filled with unusual plans she’d purchased, been given, and in many cases, dug up.

The promise of a clump of Coral vine was the thing that tempted me to the Cofer’s garden in the first place. Coral vine is an annual or perennial vine, depending on how the winter treats it, that is evergreen in warmer climates where it may become invasive. Here it will die back in winter and, if mulched and protected a little, will reappear in spring with a mass of delicate pink flowers and arrow shaped leaves. “Give it something to climb on,” she warned me. “It grows a lot over the summer.”

Though Ms. Cofer’s Coral Vine had no flowers, my friend Linda Christine knew where there was one blooming and took me to Gem Lakes to see it. The Shealy’s garden in Gem Lakes is abounding in color now, and the Coral Vine, buzzing with bees, made a lush cover over the trellis where it was planted.

Mrs. Cofer had other plants she wanted to share that I would have loved to take off her hands if I could - a healthy loquat tree, a sprawling Angel Trumpet.

It’s Angel Trumpet time now. Kathy Walker, also of New Ellenton, sent me a photo of her Angel Trumpet, taller the roof of her house.

I don’t know if there’s a more beautiful, more elegant flower than the easy to grow Angel Trumpet. Like hydrangeas of early summer, we can’t let fall go by without at least acknowledging its presence. We whacked it down to the ground after the freeze killed it last winter. Then, with the first warm days of spring, shoots begin to emerge from the mass of roots. By now, it’s gigantic, with fragrant, trumpet-shaped blossoms dangling from its branches.

Lisa Roberts sent me a photo of another plant on steroids she has growing in her front yard. She’d purchased the seeds for Castor Bean at the Pascalina Herbe Faire in the spring and said she felt like Jack that planted the Beanstalk. The plants are already twice the height of her 6’2” son with burgundy palm-shaped leaves and fuzzy seed pods that are a great contrast in shape and texture with many other late summer flowers and foliage plants. They grow from seed fairly easily. Just be careful. They are quite poisonous.

"In Georgia, the legend says ...

The May River toward Palmetto Bluff

That you must close your windows
At night to keep it out of the house."
from “Kudzu” by James Dickey

I’ve learned a lot about gardening from my patient friend Judy. She’s introduced me to dozens of interesting plants. She taught me about how I should be careful not to get fertilizer on the leaves of the plants I’m fertilizing and which kinds of tomatoes she thinks are the best to grow and when to plant sweet peas. Best of all, she didn’t even complain when I planted a potato vine and a five-leafed akebia vine on the arbor that stands between her garden and mine. These two have the Banksia Rose in a full-nelson now, despite my efforts to get rid of them.

Anytime a gardener plants an unusual plant, it pays to look into its background first. No matter how attractive or how beneficial a plant is, it looses its charm when you can’t control it. Take Kudzu, for instance. Judy and I were sitting near a bank overlooking the May River in Bluffton this weekend when I noticed a purple flower spike jutting up from a healthy looking vine covering the river’s bank. The flowers were pea-like in a rich purple color, on six or eight inch long spikes, and they smelled like grape Nehi.

If I hadn’t known better, I’d have picked some of it and brought it home, but being a Georgia girl, as I am, I recognized the thing by its leaves. Pueraria montana var. lobata is its botanical name, but it’s more commonly known as Kudzu.

You see Kudzu all over the southeastern United States, but it always has seemed the most abundant along I-20 between here in Atlanta. That may not be my imagination.

Kudzu was introduced into the United States in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Japanese exhibit contained a garden filled with the vine, bearing sweet smelling blooms and healthy green leaves. It began to be planted first ornamentally. Then during the Great Depression, the Soil Conservation Service encouraged people to plant it for erosion control.

Alabama filmmaker Max Shores tells us that Kudzu’s most vocal advocate was Channing Cope of Covington, Georgia, a WSB-AM (Atlanta) radio personality. During the 1940’s Cope traveled across the southeast starting Kudzu Clubs to honor what he called “the miracle vine.”

Covington, Georgia is right there in the Kudzu corridor along the interstate. Maybe the proliferation of the vine there was not just in my head.

Cope was disappointed when the U.S. government stopped advocating the use of Kudzu in 1953. Kudzu just grows too well here it seems. Our winters aren’t cold enough to kill back the roots, and Kudzu spreads like a creature from a science fiction novel. The vines grow as much as a foot per day during the summer, over trees, power poles, and anything else it comes in contact with.
To get rid of it, you must continuously cut back the leaves to deplete its carbohydrate supply or destroy the root crown, a fibrous mass of tissue that sits on top of the root, which can regenerate, even it’s dumped in another site.
Some parts of Kudzu are edible. The young leaves can be used for salad, or cooked like spinach. I’ve read about, but never tried, the flowers of Kudzu that may be battered and fried or made into jelly, and the roots that can be cooked as well. Parts of Kudzu are used in herbal medicine.
The southeastern United States is no longer the only area with claim to Kudzu creep. Dr. Harry Shealy tells me that it has spread north to Illinois and west to Texas. It’s also invaded South Africa, Malaysia and some western Pacific Islands. But we may claim the most acres covered – over 2,000,000.

Kudzu blooms everywhere, he says, not only along the coast. The flowers just don’t show up well from a distance. If I like the flowers, and they are quite attractive, I could plant a Millettia, or Evergreen Wisteria vine, a much more mannerly look-alike. But I won’t plant a Kudzu vine on the arbor or anywhere else. That might push Judy over the edge.

For a county of around 150,000, Aiken is well represented in “Garden and Gun” magazine’s “50 Best of the New South” this month. The article names Beech Island native Jenks Farmer, Best Horticulturist . Jenks is curator and designer of Moore Farms in Lake City, SC and owner of Lush Life Nursery, a great mail-order source for Crinum Lilies. Woodlanders’ Nursery, right here in downtown Aiken, is listed as “Best Nursery.” There is plenty of competition in both arenas. Hometown boys make good!

If You Go To the Beach, You're Going to get Sand in Your Bed

It was not the worst house we’ve ever rented. In some ways, it surpassed the houses where we stayed on Pawleys Island in the 70’s. This house had air-conditioning, practically unheard of in a rental then. It had a dishwasher. We washed and dried by hand. It had a washer and dryer. We either went to the laundromat or wore dirty. And this house had a microwave, which, in the early 70’s, had been invented but nobody owned one.

This house, on another South Carolina beach, was surrounded by a little grass, a lot of ants and a whole lot of sand, which, because the house sat flat on the ground, made its way into the house, and even our beds, with regularity, and the house broom didn’t get much rest.

Here in Aiken, on the edge of the sandhills, we fight another battle with sand. Peaches, watermelons and peanuts love sandy soil, but most other garden and landscape plants need more nutrients than it provides. Sandy soil is good for plants that don’t like wet feet, but hard on plants that need a lot of water, so we must constantly amend with humus and other organic material.

But Sand is what makes the beach a beach, I think. A rocky beach should be called something else. Sand is “nature’s true grit,” says Todd Ballantine in his wonderful book about beach ecology, “Tideland Treasure.” .

Three things make up our beach sand, he says. Quartz is weathered from Appalachian granite and was transported here by ancient rivers. Ground up sea shells are calcium carbonate pulverized by sea surf. The final ingredient is detritus from plants, animals, plankton skeletons, fecal pellets and bacteria. Sand feels gritty, as opposed to silt, which is smaller grained and feels smooth. Sand feels especially gritty when it’s rubbed between the bottom sheet and your bare legs.

It was only a short walk across the sand dunes to the beach from our house. Sea Oats are the most plentiful plants on the dunes. They are the seashore’s indispensable “amber waves of grain” with creamy panicles on six foot stalks that bend in the intense beach wind. A wild relative of the oats from which oatmeal is made, Sea Oats are there for more than just decoration. These Sea Oats send roots deep down into the dunes and help hold them in place.

Other beach grasses populate the dunes as well. Bitter panic grass, broomsedge, nutgrass, and the nasty, foot-puncturing sandspur help keep the dunes from blowing away.

Besides the sandspur, other shore plants have developed thorny defenses against marauding herbivores. Horse nettle, Solanum carolinense, is close kin to our garden tomato (the same genus) and is familiar to Aiken gardeners as an irritating yellow flowered, thorny spined plant that pops up regularly in our flower and vegetable beds.

Other spiky plants that grow wild on the dunes are also grown as ornamentals in xeriscaping. Yucca has sharp, pointed leaves that grow in a rosette shape with a tall candelabra of white flowers. Prickly Pear cactus pops up here and there and bears a flower and a fruit that can be made into jelly.

Closer to the ground, yellow flowering Evening Primrose still blooms along with wild Morning Glory. One of the most prevalent beach plants and one that that we don’t seeing growing wild in Aiken is the round leaved Beach Pennywort. And there’s smilax, of course.

All these plants have adapted to grow in the sand in the hot, windy, salty conditions that exist along the shore. If it weren’t for them, the dunes would blow away or wash away and eventually the houses would too. We wouldn’t have our yearly family vacation, where the big boys can go fishing and the little boys can dig a hole to China and fill it with ocean water.

So it wasn’t the best house. Most mornings began with the chirp of two-year-old Elliot calling, “Mammommy! PopPop!” and ended with a quiet night on the porch with his big brother who’s now four and fascinated with sea turtles. “Look, grandmommy, the moon looks like a seashell.” Angel voices. What’s a little sand in your bed?

Picks and Pans for Summer 08

There’s nothing like late August in the South Carolina midlands to separate the sheep from the goats. We’ve rolled along all summer, enticed by wonderful flowering things we’ve seen growing at the nursery or in glossy photos in magazines. We’ve brought them home and planted them in the appropriate place in the garden and expected them to look like they did in the picture or newly emerged from the greenhouse.

Just like the dress from Talbots that looks fabulous in a size 6 on a 5’9” model in the catalog but not quite the same in a size 14 on you in front of the full length mirror in your bedroom, real life sometimes doesn’t live up to exactly what we expected.

Still in a testing mood after last week’s tomato test, I want to gather some recommendations from Aiken Gardeners for their favorite hardy plants for local gardens. I’ll start with some of my picks and pans:

Dragonwing Begonia. The bright red flowers and thick shiny leaves of this annual make it a star in my book. Dragonwing seems resistant to pests – something I’ve been fighting all summer in some parts of my garden. It’s able to stand up to a few weeks of low water when the sprinkler head was broken, and to just be an all around good plant. It seems happy in shade or a whole lot of sun.
Alternantha. I think this variety is called “Party Time,” though there are dozens of other varieties in many colors with different leaf shapes to recommend. I planted a few pots of this rather late and it still seems to be thriving. Alternanthera is grown for its foliage, and this particular variety has pink and green leaves that fill in the holes with color without the demands of a flowering plant. Tom Rapp uses a chartreuse alternanthera with small, bright green leaves in some of the city plantings and has for several years. That’s a clue that it’s a hardy plant.
Purple fountain grass. There’s nothing like the drought tolerant grasses to add interest and texture to a bed. This fountain grass is especially attractive as it nods in the morning breeze. Too bad it won’t bloom year round.
Black-eyed Susan. Probably the most common wildflower across the United States, a sign that it can deal with hot summers and occasional neglect.
Lantana. Any plant that survives the summer on the west side of my house out of sprinkler range, and returns every year in a burst of yellow, butterfly loving color, can stay in my garden as long as I can turn a spade.

And now for the plants that did not live up to my expectations.
Sun Coleus. I know I have mentioned more than once that whatever is eating plants in the back bed must be especially fond of these coleus. I have grown them for years and they always seemed to stand out as good plants. This year I’m ready to be done with them. Is it something I said? Have I taken them for granted? I’ve vowed to give this bed a thorough renewing this fall and then again in spring. Coleus gets one more chance and we’ll part for good.
Plectranthus ‘Mona Lavender” She looked so pretty in the hanging baskets – so hardy and soft. Mona must have given the critters of the night a come hither look and they took her up on the invitation. They’ve been munching on those leaves all summer. No leaves, so no flowers. No more Mona for me unless it’s in a hanging basket.
Some of the new coneflowers. I think I’ll stick with the old reliable varieties. ‘Magnus’ is a good one that’s been around a while and has proven itself.

F.A.T.T.

.“You know what they said when the old lady kissed the cow…there’s no accounting for taste.” Old Elder family saying.

They’re celebrating in Atlanta these days. Not because the Dogs were the preseason pick for number one in the nation for the first time ever. That seems to make everybody a bit nervous. But they’ve had rain! Though Lake Lanier is still low, this July’s rainfall was above average and watering is again allowed, though there are still some restrictions.

Judging by the abundance of produce at one small Farmers’ Market, in the parking lot of St. Phillips Cathedral on Peachtree Road in Buckhead, there’s a bumper crop of vegetables – and not your ordinary vegetables.

I’ve been reading, and writing, about heirloom vegetables, primarily tomatoes, for the past two years. I planted some heirloom tomatoes last year and some more this year, but had not had much success. I wanted to taste them and see if they really were as good as promised. Wanting some to keep and some to give some away, I chose four, maybe five, varieties, picked two of each variety and divided them into two bags.

“That’ll be $17.95,” said the girl behind the table. Gulp. That was somewhere around two dollars a tomato. These had better be good.

I gave some away, supplementing my gift with some less expensive hybrids, and brought home one of each variety for the First Annual Tomato Taste Test – held in the kitchen, just before dinner on Sunday night. The pricey heirloom tomatoes would be judged against hybrid tomatoes straight from the side bed, just picked that afternoon. These hybrids were planted in fresh, fertilized soil back in the spring. They get regular watering from the sprinkler and have stayed healthy all summer without additional fertilizer or insecticides.

The judges of the F.A.T.T. Test were my husband Hank, our son David, and me. Each type of tomato was sliced and put on a separate plate, with a light sprinkle of salt.

We found, not surprisingly, that after thirty-nine years of marriage, Hank and I have similar taste. The bright red, juicy, fresh out of our garden tomato was our favorite. Were we influenced by the fact that it was red and juicy and we knew it was fresh? Probably. David liked his a bit firmer and liked one of the heirlooms better.

“Aunt Ruby’s German Green,” “Georgia Streak,” and ”Black from Tula” were the heirlooms we tried. The comments about them were inconsistent. We thought the heirlooms were tasty, but hardly worth two bucks each.

I’m not sure what I expected. I suppose the heirloom tomato sensation is, in fact, a reaction to those awful grocery store tomatoes, the ones grown for their thick skin and shippability that are totally lacking in taste. If that’s your basis for comparison, there’s no contest. The hybrid vs. heirloom race is about even until you consider that heirlooms are a little harder to find and harder to grow. Then hybrid’s the winner I think.
What’s the difference between a hybrid, a heirloom, and a genetically modified tomato? Heirloom vegetables are simply vegetables that come from seed that has been saved and grown for a period of years. To be capable of being saved, they must be open pollinated, meaning the seeds produce seedlings just like the parent plant.
Hybrids, the kind of tomatoes we usually grow and buy at the local farmers’ market, are crosses between different plants in an effort to get the best features of both parents. The reason varieties such as Better Boy, Early Girl, Marion (developed at Clemson – my friend Judy’s favorite) have survived to be grown in back yard gardens is that they are fairly easy to grow, are resistant to disease, and they’re pretty tasty, especially when you pick them straight off the vine.
Genetically modified plants have been genetically altered using molecular genetics techniques such as gene cloning and protein engineering. The FDA promises us they are safe and are being developed so that we can buy a tasty tomato at Kroger in the middle of the winter. With some exceptions – the Romas and Grape Tomatoes aren’t so bad – I’d say they need to keep working on it.
Give me the Aiken Farmers’ Market any day, where the vegetables are reasonably priced and taste as good as any I know. Hollie Gartman tells me she hopes to have sweet Silver King corn until September to go with the table full of tomatoes she displays every week.
But I’m still pulling for the Bulldogs.