Friday, July 15, 2011

Sungold!





These little beauties, the first of the season, added some sparkle to tonight's salad.

They are a feast for all the senses. Translucent orange eye candy, sweetly tangy on the taste buds, with a haunting fragrance that could be marketed as perfume (I always forget, year-to-year, how good they smell, until I find myself going out to the garden just to bury my nose in the fruiting plants again) -- they also feel nice to the touch, smooth and perfect like golden marbles. Do they sound good too? Well, to me, the evocative name falls poetically on the ear: Sungold!

For the record: This year's one Sungold plant was an organically grown, hybrid F1 seedling from Natural Gardening, set out on May 9 with marigold, basil, and parsley seedlings, plus a few nasturtium seeds poked in the ground here and there. The days-to-maturity was given as 57 days, which is a couple of weeks earlier than this plant's first fruits -- but the DTM is always an estimate.

So far, all the companion plants are doing well, too. The only problem to date is that the lower leaves on the tomato plant are showing the brown spots and progressive deadening that appears every year no matter what I do. But, right now, I don't feel like quibbling about the details. Let's just admire the results.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello, I stumbled upon your blog by searching for Trombetta squash. My seeds came today from Renee's Garden. I just wanted to let you know I enjoyed your posts thoroughly and have now read many of them, one hour later. I want to try some of those recipes like zuchinni flatbread and THE nut loaf. It was good to know that others have the same problem with tomatoes, late ripening and the darn things dying from the stem up. Please keep on blogging about your experiences and with the pictures of your harvests, I'm a fan from Monterey Park east of Los Angeles and south of Pasadena.

BB said...

Hi, Anon! Thanks for the kind remarks. I wasn't planning to plant Trombetta this year but one sprang up unbidden from the debris pile in the back corner of the yard. It's now the healthiest plant in the garden and growing like crazy. I'll post a photo soon. Good luck with your own efforts. We've had over five years of adventures now with that one seed packet from Renee's Garden. Hope you enjoy the flatbread and nutloaf as much as we do. The nutloaf is a certified heirloom recipe in our family, and the flatbread is likely to achieve that status too. As for the tomatoes, what can I say? It seems like once we start eating the fresh homegrown fruits each year we completely forget all the worry and trouble that went into it.