Tomatillo Time Lapse

We are growing tomatillos for the first time this summer.

Tomatillo transplants far left,  May 22

Purple tomatillos, June 3

Close-up of the tomatillo vines

green tomatillo growing crooked

Tomatillo buds, June 11

June 21

June 29

June 26

July 4

We're growing both purple and green tomatillos. I had never seen purple tomatillos before, but apparently the fruit can be purple, red, or yellow when ripe. When I saw the purple seed packets at a nursery early this spring, I knew I wanted to try to grow both green and purple ones. 

We started the seeds indoors in March and transplanted them in May. As with 95% of our vegetables, they're in containers. I thought the vines were growing a little crooked, but without a plant in the ground to compare them with, I'm not sure if that's normal or what. But they began to sprout buds, and a couple of weeks ago we counted three different types of bees buzzing around all the blooms, so I kept my fingers crossed....and right now all the plants have blossoms and/or husks forming! All tomatillos develop their fruit within the husk. 

I'd read that tomatillos won't set fruit by themselves and need another plant to help with pollination. We have three green plants and two purple ones. I also read that they don't need to be staked, so their weird crooked stems probably serve to provide stability. We're treating them as we do our other container vegetables--making sure they get watered regularly and keeping a layer of mulch in the container to prevent weeds and preserve moisture. Within the next week or two we'll probably add some fertilizer.

I'm so anxious to see the fruit! The packet says 60 days to harvest, so that should be around mid- late-July. We can't pick them until the husks turn brown and start to split open. I've peeked inside some of the husks and see blooms in there (last picture). I hope it's the beginning of a lot of fruit.

Green tomatillos don't taste very good by themselves, in my opinion. They don't have the sweet taste or soft skin of a regular tomato, but they are excellent ingredients in salsas and taste good grilled. The purple variety supposedly tastes sweeter, but I plan to add it to salsas and grill them too. I'm collecting salsa recipes and am thinking about maybe adding them to chili. If anyone has any good recipes with tomatillos as an ingredient, please send me recommendations! I'd love to experiment with different dishes using tomatillos as an ingredient.

My Own Mutant Vegetables

In my Freaky Fruit post a couple of weeks ago I wrote about the misshapen fruit that can sometimes grow in a garden. Well it turns out that I have a few little weirdos of my own. The first three pictures are all Black Krim tomatoes, a new variety I'm growing this year. Three different Black Krim plants have odd-shaped fruit developing. The first one looks like a spider, the second one is growing a twin attached to it, and the third one has a fruit that appears to be growing flat. 

The last two pictures are not of a mutant, but it's an example of the difference in size between yellow squash grown in a container (left) and one grown in the ground (right). The squash on the left came from my own garden. The huge one on the right came from my husband's office community garden. He planted yellow squash seeds there from the same packet that we used at home in our container garden. What a huge difference! Oh, how I wish we had more yard space! 

UPDATE: I should have pointed out that not all the Black Krims look like that. The plants are growing some normal looking tomatoes. The giant squash in the community garden got way too big and it's forming seeds, so he brought it home because it wasn't going to be donated.

Red, White, and Bloom

Happy Independence Day to my fellow USA blogger friends!

1. strawberry; 2. early girl tomato; 3. bonnie grape tomatoes; 4. bonnie grape tomatoes on the vine; 5. early girl tomatoes with a couple of green beans from a recent harvest; 6 & 7. pink diamond hydrangea (still in the white bloom phase); 8. jalapeno plant buds; 9. david ramsey hydrangea; 10. bee on a tomatillo blossom