My first cherry Tomato!

[T]

Hi All,

I got my first cherry tomato today! My wife's eyes lit up when she ate it. :-)

I have a million more green ones to go!

-T

[songbird]

haha! ya! we have some green ones coming along. don't usually have anything ripe until a few more weeks. i'm glad we only put in one cherry tomato plant this season. i can't eat them and it is a waste of space if they are mostly falling on the ground.

songbird

[T]

Oh that sucks! Do they hurt your digestion?

We eat them like candy. I have brought in a bowl of them to my wife, turned around, then turned back, found an empty bowl, then found my wife displaying two distinct emotions: guilt and absolute delight. Which, of course, means I have to grow cherry tomatoes for the rest of my life. She has that effect. I call it the "whammy". She shows no sign of reform after 42 years.

Being Primal and all (drug free T2 Diabetic), the both of us (she eats exactly what I eat to keep me from ever being tempted) can taste the subtle sweets of things. Store bought tomatoes are horrible! They even manage to somehow screw up heirloom tomatoes.

[songbird]

no, i grew up eating and cooking italian food with plenty of tomatoes my whole life until i turned 50 and then i started getting rashes. eventually i narrowed it down to tomatoes causing the problem.

when i used to go out to pick i could eat a few dozen and then come in and have a tomato sandwich. one of my most favorite meals in the winter is toast with butter and a jar of home-made salsa on it. Ma's favorite is macaroni and tomato juice (from home grown tomatoes). i love it too, when first made with butter melted on top... so having gone on tomato restriction is changing my diet in a lot of ways. Ma also has been having fun doing some of her dishes without tomatoes or finding alternative versions. spaghetti and meatballs, i rinse the meatballs off. just not the same.

saying it sucks is an understatement. once in a while i do eat tomatoes anyways and pay the price.

this year i'm growing extra red peppers so i can make stuff with red pepper sauce instead of tomatoes.

yes, we don't usually add sugar, salt or pepper to things we cook here. i am gradually lowering my own sugar intake, but i still have a few things i do like some sugar on. i know i'm making progress though because i had Ma get some frosted corn flakes for a recipe i wanted to try and determined that they were too sweet to eat as cereal. i would have to mix them with two to three times plain corn flakes to get the level to more tolerable.

songbird

[T]

Double SUCKS!

My wife can not be in the house with a ripening conventional tomato (the packers smother them in chlorinated hydrocarbons), but she is perfectly fine with my home grown tomatoes and store bought organic tomatoes. But I don't think this is your problem as you farm organically.

You can try stevia. But be careful, too much doesn't make it cloying; too much tastes like gasoline (saccharin). It isa self limiting in that sense.

Be careful. A bowl of corn flakes without the sugar is the same below your neck as a bowl of sugar without the corn flakes.

I have switches to parmesan romano cheese as a sub for breading on my pan fried chicken. You got to be careful not to burn it, but oh may does it taste good! Make sure you get the fresh stuff (Trader Joe's has a great one), not the stuff from the cardboard tube (yuk!). And be careful not to add salt till you eat it. Parmesan romano is very salty.

I take it back on the double sucks. Bell pepper sauce ?!?!?! Make that for a triple sucks! Oh Man!

I wonder if this stuff (or your own sub) would work?

Ingredients: Organic Carrots, Water, Beets, Organic Onions, Lemon Juice, Kosher Salt, Garlic, Basil, Oregano, and Ascorbic Acid (vitamin C) I am up to four cherry tomatoes now! I got hundreds of green ones.

-T

[songbird]

i don't use the term organically that often, but consider it natural, traditional or even simplistic.

...

doubt i will bother growing it here, but i did try a leaf when i visited my brother. interesting plant for sure.

my own ideas are more in the line that if something tastes like sugar then it is probable to some extent that even the taste alone can kick off bodily responses. so i tend to avoid the sugar substitutes also.

...

not bell pepper (aka green peppers i don't particularly like), red peppers are much better IMO.

all things i can eat, would skip the salt and acid. lemon juice is ok as is.

we'll see how the peppers work out this year. :) i ate a lot of them last year. one time i went out and picked over 40 of them and cooked up half of them right away along with some sausage and onions. very yummy, except then of course i want to eat it all up...

we're seeing plenty of green ones here too. i will have to look tomorrow when i'm watering to see how things are coming along. plenty of beef- steaks on the plants. :) we'll be canning most of them eventually.

songbird

[T]

I personally think you are the absolute cutting edge or organic farming. "When" we humans venture out into space and grow our own food along the way, your techniques will be solely needed. Out own planet will be need your techiniques solely in the not too distant future too.

Didn't know you had a cheering section, did you? No! What did I just say??? I take it back.

What ??? Okay, maybe a little. What ??? Okay, okay, maybe a lot. :-)

True. Stevia is self limiting as more doesn't taste sweeter. The YUK factor (tastes like gasoline) stops you in your tracks.

I sometimes will use Stevia to try to trigger a response to get my blood sugar down. It doesn't work very well.

I will not use any other sweetener. I think artificial sweeteners are insane. Sucralose was actually a discarded pesticide. Be fun to have listened to the conversation as to who would taste it first. A lo of Diabetics use Sucralose. I messes the intestines up (why yo get the runs and how it killed bugs) and it keeps your satiation switch from resetting to natural levels of sweetness. As I said, insane.

-T

Sucks that the we lost Stormin home over on the repair group. Breaks my heart.

[songbird]

ha, ok, well...

i don't think it is complicated or fancy or even cutting edge. it's more like what people would do when thinking about how to recycle nutrients instead of letting them get thrown away.

in contemplating any long distance scenarios it's going to be really interesting to figure out how metals will work and how they will have to be recycled or managed. some planets may have no metals at all. however, i suspect humans may leave this form behind long before we spread out too far and perhaps it will make no sense to dive down a steep gravity well just to have space when we can have space in space instead. we may just become space capable ourselves and not need habitats or plants or any of the rest of the biological support system we have on this planet. dunno... would be interesting to be able to stick around and see what happens.

...

i didn't know him that well, but yeah RIP.

songbird