Forecast: Too many tomatoes

Plus, an endorsement for SunGold kiwis and a strawberry storage tip.

I don’t know what happened. Somehow, between a Memorial Day sale here and a post-Memorial Day sale there, we wound up with eight tomato plants in our garden.

Cherokee Purple. Pineapple tomato. SunSugar yellow cherry tomato. Sweet Million red cherry tomato. La Roma. Aunt Gertie’s Gold beefsteak tomato. Fourth of July slicer tomato. Better Boy.

I guess my strategy is to overwhelm the neighborhood deer and rabbits and groundhogs with so many options that they give up in indecision and scamper elsewhere.

But if they leave any for us, it should be a delicious summer of tomato sandwiches.

Recent Pre-K graduate Jagger has been very helpful with watering and encouragement. The other day when he encountered with his watering can a flower that had its blooms bitten off at the stem, he said, “Don’t worry, it’s still beautiful even without its flower. And besides, if we water it, it will grow back again!”

Every plant gets a shower.

We were at America’s first zoo last weekend, and they were giving out samples of SunGold kiwis. They are like regular kiwis except they’re not fuzzy on the outside, they’re yellow and less seedy on the inside, and they taste like really good lemonade that’s right on the edge of being too tart. (High in vitamin C, yellow kiwis have been grown in New Zealand since the 1990s, first being exported to Japan, then European countries starting in 2000. The SunGold is a relative of Hort16A, the first variety of yellow kiwi, and both were developed by Zespri International.) Jagger loves them — it’s his food of the week this week — and we found them at Wegmans in four-packs, so they exist outside of the zoo. You should try them if you see them — tell me what you think!

You’d smile too if you tasted these strawberries!

Jagger also led us in a pick-your-own strawberry expedition at Urban Roots Farm for the most magnificent strawberries we’ve ever tasted. We used a bunch to make a pie, which Jagger topped with pie-dough cutouts of dinosaurs and fish. I also picked a pint of green strawberries to pickle. And we kept the rest in the fridge for daily eating. I was worried about how long they’d keep given their intense ripe-juiciness. But I used this method — don’t pre-wash, place in a single layer on a paper towel in an airtight container, and refrigerate — and they stayed perfectly fresh for a full week.

Strawberry pie with dinos and fish.

More soon. Thank you for reading!

EB