A Second Try on a New Crop

Have you ever tried a new venture, a new recipe, a new crop only to fall flat on your face?  Have no fear!  I collect quotes like some folks collect stamps.  I read a quote by an unknown individual that says, "When times get hard, remember that the definition of success is falling down six times and getting up seven."

With that in mind to set the table, so to speak.  Let me tell you about a new crop I tried to plant.  Tomatillos.  After Tricia began making Salsa Verde using tomatillos, we liked it so much, I decided that we would grow them.  I didn't grow up eating this strange fruit and neither did Tricia.  I ordered some tomatillo seeds and planted them.  The three plants grew to a height of about 3 feet tall!  They filled with blooms!  The honeybees flew from flower to flower. We waited for fruit to set.

And waited.  And waited...

We produced exactly 0 tomatillos.  I was about to toss the tomatillo seeds into the compost pile when I decided to do some research.  What I learned was that there are three issues that cause tomatillos not to set fruit.

#1    Low Sunlight:    this is not the case.  Our tomatillos were in direct sunlight the entire day.

#2    Excess Fertilizer:    this is not the case.  I applied NO fertilizer to the plants.

#3    High Humidity:    winner, winner chicken dinner!

Armed with this information, I decided that 2023 would be the year we would try again.  I would plant EARLY, hoping to get the plants well established, blooming, and setting fruit before the months of high humidity set in.

And lo and behold!:

Tomatillos sort of look like a greenish-yellow tomato, but with a husk on it.  We picked a basket full of them:

The flesh is firm.  It is bigger than a cherry tomato, but smaller than a slicing tomato.  For comparison, I would say it is slightly larger than a golf ball.

Using the recipe Shown here in a previous blog post Tricia mixed up a batch of salsa verde with our (successfully grown) tomatillos.  Here's what it looked like:

The oven roasted tomatillos, garlic, onions, jalapenos and cilantro were warm.  Dipping a blue corn tortilla into the salsa, we tried it.

Fantastic!  Thankfully, I read the instructions and found what the problem was prior to throwing out the seeds.  I'm bad about jumping into action without reading the instructions.  Now I know, plant the tiny tomatillo seeds very early to get a jump before the humidity spikes.  I'll try to save some seeds to ensure we have more to plant next year.

A New Crop For Us

We always like to try new crops that we haven't grown before.  Last year it was kohlrabi.  I was not really familiar with that, but we grew it and really enjoyed it.  We'll be planting more this year.  Sometimes, we like to plant new varieties that we've not tried.  This past spring we tried the Alabama Black Eyed Lima bean.  As the name suggests, it has the looks of a black eyed pea, but it's a lima bean.  I love black eyed peas and limas, so this has to be good, right?

I planted them in the spring and they promptly grew lush and filled up the trellis.  Then something weird happened.  They bloomed and produced pods, but the pods never filled out with beans in them.  Since this spring, we've not eaten a single one.  Here is the trellis full of Alabama Black Eyed Limas.

A curious thing happened this week though.  I began cleaning up the rows just to the west of the trellis to make room for transplanting the tomatoes.  The remnants of squash plants, purple hull peas and black beans needed to be cleared back.  Once it was all cleaned up, something caught my eye on the trellis.  Yep, you got it.  The black eyed lima beans decided to FINALLY start filling out the pods with beans!  The vines were full of them, too!

So I pulled one off and popped it open.  Sure enough!:

It's a black eyed lima bean.  We haven't eaten any yet, so I can't give a review.  This harvest was a long time coming.  I ALMOST chopped down the vines to make room for another crop.  I'm glad I didn't.  It looks like this fall we'll get some lima beans to eat.  Speaking of wanting something to eat, while I was shelling the lima bean pod to see if it really looked like black eyed peas, I was greeted by a beggar in the garden.  

That's Elsie.  Isn't that a face that you just can't say "no" to?  Wasn't long after that her cousin-sister (it's complicated) LuLu came to panhandle with her.

In just a week or two we'll be harvesting the sweet potatoes, so these two, along with Rosie, will be getting a ton of sweet potato vines to eat.  They love those things.  Be patient, girls.