Purple tomatillo

Tomatillo flowers and fruit beginning to ripen

Tomatillo (Physalis ixocarpa) are another vegetable which comes out of South America.  Just like a tomato, eggplant or pumpkin technically speaking it is the fruit of the tomatillo that we eat.  The fruits of the tomatillo are enclosed in a papery husk which I think is part of their charm.  Sometimes people call the tomatillo a "husk tomato".

Apparently the Aztecs domesticated the tomatillo prior to the year 800 BC.  After the Spanish conquistadors went to South America they returned with most of the vegetables we eat today.  Both tomatoes and tomatilloes were brought with them, they are similar looking fruits with similar sounding names that were commonly shortened by Europeans.  Due to this there is a lot of confusion regarding historical manuscripts if they were referring to tomatoes, tomatilloes or some other vegetable.  Regardless we know that they were one of the first vegetables brought back by the Spanish in the 1500s.

Skeletonised tomatillo husk - I dont know what causes this but it is beautiful

For some reason the tomatillo never really took off outside of its home range.  Other vegetables which were discovered at the same time such as tomato, potato, beans, corn, pumpkin, squash, chilli etc now form the mainstay of our vegetable diet.  I honestly do not know why the tomatillo never gained favor as tomatilloes grow like crazy suffering no real pests or diseases, they produce huge amounts of fruit that is simple to harvest, it is simple to save seeds from tomatilloes, and they look kind of cool.  The paper husk (technically a calyx) that surrounds each fruit seems to prevent fruit fly, slugs and most other pests from damaging any fruit.  They are so productive that I have even heard and read in many places that 2 or 3 plants will provide more than enough tomatilloes for a family!

The texture is difficult to describe, kind of like an under ripe spongy tomato, perhaps that is not a great description, it is pretty cool.  They kind of taste similar to a tomato in some ways, but have a kind of citrus taste in there too.  When cooked they take on more of a citrus taste.  They are difficult to describe.  I am told that they are the main ingredient in salsa verde.  They can also be cut and put into salds, salsas or pureed into guacamole or gazpacho or used to flavor rice.  I have also heard of them being used to tenderise red meat.

 I have grown some green and yellow/green tomatilloes in the past and they were good but this time I wanted to grow some nice looking purple tomatilloes.  The plants grew well for me and flowered like crazy.  Each plant was covered in masses of yellow flowers but none of them were setting fruit.  I dont know why this is but some people say that their plants flower well but nothing ever comes of it, perhaps they remove the plant too soon and are not patient enough.  I have also heard that you need at least two plants to cross pollinate each other, I have never grown less than that so cant really comment.  These plants will cross pollinate with other varieties of tomatillo pretty easily so if you grow more than one type please take care if saving seeds.

After weeks of nice yellow flowers that did nothing I started to consider puling out the plants and then the first fruit began to form, then seemingly overnight I had hundreds of fruits forming!  The size of the fruit ranged quite dramatically on each plant, small ones in the beginning of the season and larger ones as the season progressed.  I have seen people on ebay selling seeds of "giant tomailloes", mine were reaching that size towards the end of their run.  They produced a huge amount of fruit in the end but they were not as dark purple as I had hoped.  Some were green, some were light purple, some were only purple where the sun hit the fruit, some had a mix of both on the one plant.  They all look really cool.  They kept on producing lots of fruit right until the frost killed them.

Tomatillo fruit, the paper husks are beginning to split open and show the fruit inside

I usually harvest the fruit after it falls from the plant by itself, the husk protects the fruit from damage so they can stay on the ground for a few days before I get to them if need be.  Some people harvest them earlier and I am told it does not affect the taste at all.  The one thing I have been warned is not to pick them before the fruit finishes filling out the husk otherwise it wont be ripe and apparently does not taste terrific.  

They store best when left in their husk, most people store them in the fridge but they can last a while on the bench or in the pantry.  When it is time to eat them the husk needs to be removed and the fruit will be a little sticky, I find that it is simple to wash this off.

Being closely related to tomatoes and potatoes and considering how simple it is to take cuttings from those I wondered how easy it would be to take a cutting from a tomatillo.  I cut a small branch off and put it in a cup of water on the kitchen windowsil.  In two days that small cutting had sprouted roots and a few days later I was able to plant it. This plant is still slowly growing, flowering and setting fruit as it is in a pot out of the frost.

I do sell seeds of the "purple"  tomatilloes on my for sale page.  If you do grow them please grow more than one plant so that you will have adequate pollination but resist the temptation to grow too many.  They are so productive that 2 or 3 plants easily provides more than enough tomatilloes for the family.

 

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Non flowering Sorrel in Australia

Sorrel is a perennial leaf vegetable that I always considered growing, but was not sure how good it is or if I would like it.  It is reasonably difficult to find so I never bothered tracking it down.  Living in such an extreme climate I do not have space or water to waste on novelty vegetables, I need hardy and productive plants.  We also dont have the money to throw away if it turned out not to be worth growing.  

Every source of sorrel I can find only had seeds, no one seemed to offer plants and the seeds were seemingly from poorly maintained stock and never from improved plants.  I considered buying some seeds, but dont want to waste money on inferior plants or start another breeding project.  One day someone kindly offered me a sorrel plant in a trade.  They offered it as well as something that I really wanted so I figured I had nothing to lose.

Sorrel plant

When the sorrel turned up it was a small red green stump with no leaves and very few roots.  Apparently that is how they are best posted and it is how they settle in the fastest.  I planted it and figured it would be a few weeks before I saw any real growth or got to try a leaf.  The next day it had a new leaf and a few days later it had grown several leaves!  I tried a tiny piece of a leaf to see what it tastes like.  It was like any leaf vegetable really but also lemony.  My kids love lemony things and often eat anything sour that they can find so I was happy.

It did not take long before I was able to divide the plant.  I divided it several times by digging it up, ripping it into pieces each with a growing point, removing the leaves, and replanting.  Winter came and the growth slowed, frosts did not seem to worry it.  Some people say that it goes a bit dormant over winter, this may be the case but my winters can be mild and it did have some protection so it kept growing.  Over spring it grew like crazy, I should have divided it into a bunch of plants but kind of forgot about it.  Summer hit pretty hard, the leaves got burned by the heat a few times (as did the leaves of every fruit and vegetable I grew this year) but they kept on growing.  When the weather cooled down the sorrel took off again, this time I dug it up and divided it a little.  When dividing sorrel they do best if you cut off all of the leaves, it seems harsh but it will grow new leaves soon enough.

Sorrel leaves ready for cooking/eating

I have read that sorrel usually has separate male and female plants, sometimes it has a plant that has male and female on the same plant, rarely the highly sort after non-flowering plants turn up.  Flowering stops leaf growth for a while and also makes the leaves bitter so growers often talk of removing flower heads to extend the leaf harvest.

This plant was seed grown by its previous owner so it could have been anything.  After growing it for a while this appears to be a non-flowering (or at least very reluctant to flower) individual.  This means that instead of putting energy into flowers and seeds it puts all of its energy into leaf growth and dividing itself.  It also means that there is no chance of it becoming a weed or crossing with anything else.  When regular sorrel flowers the leaves become coarse and inedible for a while, by not flowering this plant has a much extended harvest period each year. 

Sorrel leaf - non flowering means more leaves

As far as I am concerned, this plant is exhibiting every trait that I would have tried to breed for, this is an improved variety!  There is apparently a variety of sorrel sold overseas known as "Profusion" which sounds similar to mine.  As profusion does not flower (so it does not set seed) and importing the plants is next to impossible my variety is the closest thing we have in Australia.

Growing sorrel is simple.  It likes water, good soil and full sun but grows happily enough if it is a little dry or in the shade or with poor dodgy soil or with competition from other plants.  I have yet to see any pest or disease issues of any kind but am told that a leaf miner bothers it in some gardens.  They say if a leaf has leaf miner to remove that leaf, destroy it, and the problem is solved.  Apparently if the plant gets a lot of leaf miner before you notice you can remove all the leaves and destroy them, sorrel will grow new leaves soon enough.

Sorrel has deep roots so mines nutrients from the subsoil and brings them to the surface in its leaves.  The soil life under sorrel is amazing and healthy.  Permaculturalists grow sorrel as a dynamic accumulator and a compost activator.  It out yields comfrey tremendously on my property, lacks the irritating hairs of comfrey, and unlike comfrey seems to be readily eaten by poultry.  I consider all of this a win.

Small sorrel plants a few weeks after being transplanted and having all the leaves removed

Being perennial means it is low maintenance, I plant once and then can forget about it and know that it will still be there if I want to harvest it, I do not need to collect seeds or remove flowers or anything like that.  Sorrel is nutritious, like many leaf vegetables it is very high in vitamin C.  Many people say that they do not let sorrel flower so that leaf growth is encouraged, with my sorrel this is unnecessary as it does not flower most years.

There are a lot of old (pre-1900) recipes that include sorrel as an integral component of the dish.  Some dishes contain sorrel and very few other things, this is not just a nice herb or a garnish, it is a decent vegetable.  Today sorrel features as a garnish, is often used when cooking fish to impart a lemon taste, is occasionally made into a fancy French soup, and is one of the main ingredients of green borscht.  You can eat sorrel raw but it is high in oxalic acid (like many other vegetables) so it is best not to eat too much.  Oxalic acid is water soluble and cooking removes most of it so you can eat cooked sorrel to your heats content.

Sorrel was commonly grown in every vegetable garden all over the world for hundreds of years then it pretty much disappeared overnight.  I know of very few people who have ever grown or tasted or even know of this productive plant.  The reason for this is that sorrel can not be harvested and stored and shipped to consumers, it must be harvested and used pretty much immediately.  For a reliable supply you must grow your own, but that is very simple to do.  For many years now people have stopped growing vegetables because they have no land, as such they miss out on tasting treasures such as sorrel.  

I hope that more people grow sorrel, I especially hope that more people grow improved non-flowering forms such as this one.  I would hate for this to disappear if I happen to lose my stock.  I am planning on building up my sorrel in Spring, until then I can sell it in small numbers through my for sale page.

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Survivor Tatsoi

When we moved in here there were no vegetables, only empty vegetable beds, which was great.  Before we moved in there was a decent flood.  After we moved in we had another rather large flood.  A year or two passed, then a vegetable seedling grew in amongst the grass and weeds in the vegetable garden path.  It was from a vegetable that I have never planted, a seed that was here before we were.  I noticed it one day as I was mowing the weeds/grass in the vegetable garden.  I decided to mow around it as I liked its style.

This is one of the descendants of the mystery vegetable

That one determined little seed sat dormant through at least two floods, waiting patiently through several extreme summers, sat quietly through some cold winters, germinated in amongst tall grass and established weeds in a path that was trodden on several times a day by myself as well as my kids.  It then evaded being eaten by snails/slugs/poultry/birds/rodents and grew into an amazing little plant without a great deal of help from anyone.  This plant had earned my respect.

I wasnt terribly certain what it was to begin with, I knew it was some type of brassica.  I thought it was some form of Asian green, but having very little experience with them I did not know which one.  I gave it some water to keep it alive but generally forgot to water it.  I tried to gently pull some weeds near it but was scared of pulling it out too so left it to struggle against them.  The kids stepped on it a few times because it was growing in a rather inconvenient place.

More of my survivor tatsoi plants

I eventually figured it was most likely tatsoi.  I like the determination of this plant, it is a true survivor that beat the odds.  We ate some leaves but I let that single plant mature and flower, then I carefully collected the seed.

Brassicas tend to need other plants for cross pollination but I got a small amount of seed.  Many of the seed pods had no seeds, many of the seeds were too small to germinate, being so hot and dry the aphids covered the flowers at times, even with all this stacked against it the survivor tatsoi set a decent number of viable seed.  Quite often brassicas will have low or no germination if the population is too small, I had one individual and no other brassicas.  Things did not look good.  I planted a lot of the seed in the hope of enough germinating to get this strain going again and almost all of them germinated!

Tatsoi in a vegetable bed, they no longer grow amongst grass

Brassicas also tend to suffer from inbreeding depression with small populations, so I did a large grow out from the seed collected from that single parent in the hopes of overcoming this.  So far the results appear to be pretty strong and healthy, I have not been able to see any lack of fitness and have a decent number of plants from here on.  I will be allowing all of these plants to flower and cross pollinate one another then I plan to collect seed from them all to maintain some small amount of genetic diversity.

What I have now is a strain of tatsoi that has overcome extreme hardship on pretty much every level.  I call it "survivor tatsoi" as I do not have any way to tell what cultivar it would have originally come from.  I hope to keep this strain going indefinitely from here on if I can.

I will probably be able to sell seeds of this tatsoi after the current batch flower/set seed and I test the seeds for germination rates.  I do not sell seeds if the germination rates fall to 85%.  When I do collect seed and test them they will be listed on my for sale page.

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