Interviewed today

[Boutique Tomatoes]

I don't know how much will make it in, but I got interviewed today for an article in one of the local magazines about the local food movement and my experiments this year with growing out so many varieties and testing the market for more exotic local produce, tomatoes and peppers in particular.


Somewhere in my hour and a half of babbling on about different tomatoes and peppers, I tossed out a phrase I'm sure I read somewhere, "New Heirlooms" to describe some of the stuff breeders today are doing. We walked around and they took pictures of some of Lee Goodwin's Bosque Blue and J&L Select Blue, Fred Hemples Blush (the favorite variety the interviewer tried), a couple of Brad Gates varieties and a few of the Tom Wagner varieties I've got growing.

When we talked about my background in cooking and restaurants and how I got passionate about food my wife pulled out a bunch of old food pictures from back in my chef days. I got to feel quite old when I heard over and over again how "nobody does stuff like this any more!" Just like my technology skills, I am a master of many things that will never be used again..


I'll post a link when the article comes out.

[tjg911]

sounds good mark do post a link when available!

tom

[neoguy]

Congrats, another celebrity in the house! Can't wait to read the article.

[Boutique Tomatoes]

Thanks Tom! We'll see what pictures if any make it into the article. One of the ones he liked was a depth of field shot of a row of tomatoes setting on the fence rail with their names written on them in Sharpie for seed saving, Prue was the first one in the line.

[Worth1]

I cant wait. I may not be available and may miss it. could you PM me when it comes out.
Pretty please.

Worth

[Boutique Tomatoes]

Worth, I'll assume you're serious and will mail you a hardcopy if you miss it after I PM you.

They were not sure if it would be in the Sept or October issue.

[lakelady]

Mark, that is so cool! Congrats to you, and score another one for homegrown tomato growers! Would love to read the article too!

[carolyn137]

Not to take away from you Mark, but I get interviewed on Thursday and he's bringing a friend with him.

He asked if I'd autograph a copy of my book and I said sure, and you're in luck b'c I just reduced the asking price from $500 to $200 and there was absolute silence on the phone but then he just started laughing. It's about a 1 1/2 hour one way drive where they're coming from and I hope the weather will be at least decent.

To earn the interview I'm going to ask them to go out back and pull the weeds from the grow-bags, remove the diseased leaves and then read back to me what some of the labels say since Freda did it without her glasses and I can't make sense of some of them. Freda just hasn't been able to be here to do the gardening she normally does, and of course that makes it rough for me, but it's been very rough for her as well.

[Boutique Tomatoes]

That's great Carolyn!

There is a lot of growing interest in the whole local foods thing here right now. This year a non-profit group has bought an old country club that is right off of downtown with the intention of turning the old 77 acre golf course into a CSA farm. That someone saw value in this kind of use rather than as a new housing development "convenient to downtown" impressed me.

Here is a newspaper article about it http://www.postcrescent.com/article/...e-gardens-jobs

And the web site for the project is http://riverviewgardens.org/

And if I was in the area I'd happily do your garden chores and help you go through your old seeds.

Originally Posted by marktutt

Just like my technology skills, I am a master of many things that will never be used again.. I'll post a link when the article comes out.

Mark,

Like Worth, I would like to know when the article comes out and you post the link.

Also, I can empathize with your quoted comment. It's sometimes frustrating to know the skills I developed in a lifetime of work and study will never be needed around the house and garden. I wish I had a USB port in my head with a flash drive inserted. I would love to simply download the information I spent a lifetime learning and hand the drive to a young person just starting. Maybe I can find a dentist who will implant a Bluetooth device in one of my teeth instead.

Ted

[Boutique Tomatoes]

We got on the subject when I started talking about how so many people don't know what the real version of things taste like today and how I think it's a shame.

I started my serious culinary career at The Breakers in Palm Beach, a 5 Star. 5 Diamond operation that at the time was privately owned and was run as a spare no expense operation where a good portion of the clientele was the rich and famous. Everything was made from scratch and my hands still hurt from doing things like hand rolling caraway salt sticks for the bar, you would never see pretzels out of a bag there. The difference from the canned, frozen mass produced world was staggering.

I later worked at other places that were not as hard core old school but where we did things that you don't see outside of food competitions today. Lots of emphasis on the 'art' part of the culinary arts. I got to work with great ingredients and classic tecniques for making the best use of them and came to realize what a blessing I had grown up with in a rural community eating food from our garden, fruit trees, the local woods and waterways. (I still remember my shock at discovering how expensive morel mushrooms were, to me they were just a wild mushroom that came up in the spring, a very good one but one that I grew up eating platters of fried along with scrambled eggs and toast.)

With the tecnology stuff I started my work in the field worrying about every byte of memory and every instruction in assembly language, the nuances of different processors, etc. The list of dead languages, hardware and operating systems whose manuals gather dust in boxes in my basement gets longer every year. I'm still working in the field but I keep wondering when my brain is going to start rejecting the shiny new whizbang technology of the minute.

Lord, now I'm feeling ancient again. Better work on a web technology project today and eat a microwave meal for lunch... nah.

Mark,

I know the mushroom thing. I spent many afternoons on my four wheeler with a large cardboard box harvesting huge Chanterelle and Oyster mushrooms in the piney woods of east Texas. I got so into it that I joined the Gulf Coast Mycological Society. Unfortunately it is to hot and dry most of the summer in North Texas for a good crop of edible mushrooms to develop.

Most people don't understand when I tell them my first "cell" phone filled half of my car trunk and was full of vacuum tubes. I didn't need my car heater in the winter because my cell phone kept the car warm. My wife's first cell phone weighed about ten lbs and had a shoulder strap. The battery was huge and required overnight charging every day. Now she is the cell phone geek requiring a new phone every time a new model is released. My cell phone fell from my pocket at the dentist's office last week. He picked it up and commented on it's being an antique since it is a flip phone. It makes phone calls and that is all I need a "phone" to do.

My company once asked me to investigate those new computer things and determine if they could have some applications in an engineering/business environment beyond accounting. I spent two weeks learning DOS and the beginning of some programming languages. A few years later, we had about three thousand computers in offices and factories around the world.

Ted

[kenny_j]

Congrats to Tom, and Carolyn, and again to Craig. You guys are the super stars of the tomato world. Most exciting thing that happened to me was I had Jury Duty this morning, and all cases ended up settled so got cut loose!!! YaaaaaYYY!

[remy]

Looking forward to reading the article!
Remy

[carolyn137]

My interview was yesterday and went very well indeed, at least from my viewpoint, and I think that of Dennis as well. I was surprised to find that he's been an SSE member for 30 years. I was not surprised when he brought me two lovely looking Dester tomatoes b'c he said he would. So one is ripe and I'll have to try and set that one up for fermentation today.

He had a friend with him, a retired lawyer who is just getting into heirloom tomatoes, and Don just kind of sat there and watched the words flying through the air between Dennis and myself.

Then we went to the back room that I call my tomato seed packing room where the sliding door to the backyard is and I cut a deal with them. I asked if they could read me the labels in the gro-bags b'c Freda didn't have her glasses on when she tried to do that, they did, and now I know what I have out there but there was one gro bag with no label and I'd like to say I'll know better what it is when the fruits appear but, I don't think fruits will appear.

I'd asked Freda to at least take off the diseased leaves since there were many and she did that Wed but also kind of scalped some plants as well. IN all my years of tomato growing I've never had such pathetic looking plants. She sprayed just once, said she fertilized, but I can't see that, and the weeds growing up in most of the gro-bags were taller than the tomato plants, but she did pull those out on Wed as well.

In return for helping me with the labels and bringing up the Dester fruits I'll be packing up seeds to send to Dennis and then he can share them with Don.

It turned out that Dennis knew a LOT about heirloom tomatoes, their histories, where from, etc., so the questions asked were NOT the standard ones at all.

THey were here for about three hours and for me it was delightful having a chance to talk tomato talk. And when they left I still had time to watch some tennis from Cincinnati.

Dennis apparently follows Craig's blog and said he was going to call him to report on his visit here and tell him that I'm a "walking encyclopedia" when it comes to tomatoes. I encouraged him to come to Tville and register, but don't know if he will or not.

Finally, when I woke up this AM I looked down at the rug when I went to get into my walker, thought I saw a large lump of cat hair, but no, it was a nice plump mouse, quite dead, that my one remaining cat had gifted me with.

Why O why do cats think, and they do think, that they have to make a formal presentation of dead critters, but heck, better she left it on the rug rather than putting it in her mouth when she jumps up on my bed to sleep.I've had Orkin pest cpntrol here since 2000 but the cost has gone up and up and is now close to $80/visit, so I cut back to just three times during the summer figuring that any that got into the house would be cat bait, and I've been right about that.