Seeking Wild Tomatoes

I am a tomato freak.  One time at a dinner party, a friend told me, “Do you realize that the only thing we’ve talked about all night is tomatoes?”  Those are the sorts of friends I have.  Back when we lived in PA and NJ, I tried growing lots of tomato varieties, and so relished the taste of a tomato just off the vine after flourishing in the long summer sunshine.  The best-tasting tomato is the one you grow yourself in your garden.  The reason why store-bought tomatoes taste so insipid – the more perfect the red tomato you choose, the more insipid it is likely to taste – is due to commercial practices. 

Read investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook’s book, called ‘Tomatoland’, for the sad, shocking story of tomato cultivation.  Estabrook inspired me to look again at the original wild tomato, the tiny cherry tomato – Solanum pimpinellifolium – progenitor of the modern tomato.   Unfortunately, since tomatoes have been cultivated commercially, the original wild tomatoes have become rare, even to their native Andes.   Estabrook described his expedition in the Andes in search of the elusive wild tomato.  He obtained GPS coordinates of a, “pretty good cluster”, of wild tomatoes from the well-known tomato geneticist, Roger Chetelat, of the University of California at Davis.  Chetelat e-mailed him a list of common names to help him in the search – tomatito, tomate de campo, tomate de culebras, tomate de zorro, tomate silvestre.  The names tell us that the locals refer to the progenitor as a ‘wild tomato’, not really a tomato that they would cultivate and eat. 

His Peruvian expedition was full of unexpected adventure but, finally, Estabrook found the plant way up in the high desert of Peru.  Solanum pimpinellifolium was a scruffy plant; scruffy but surviving, despite impossible odds – and laden with tiny tomatoes!  He popped a tiny tomato into his mouth and described what he tasted:  “The bright, sweet pop of taste was followed by a lingering, pleasant tartness, that essential balance that defines a great tomato.”

Unfortunately, the store-bought tomatoes are just as insipid in Costa Rica as everywhere else, but it’s not easy to grow large tomatoes in the tropical garden.  The sun sets in Costa Rica by 6 p.m. year round, and the rainy season limits sun to less than 4-6 hours daily, which significantly reduces the variety of tomatoes that you can grow here.  Thus, small is better.  Tiny tomatoes have a chance to ripen and turn nicely red on the vine long before the tropical elements begin to attack, which invariably happens with large tomatoes.  Where could I find a Tomate Silvestre here in Costa Rica? 

Our search led us to our friend, Hugo A. Zuniga Molina, who has carved out a totally self-sufficient garden paradise for himself and his family up near Pico Blanco in Escazu.  Years ago, he found some tiny tomato plants while walking in the wild areas of high Escazu, took them home and planted them.  Now, they are all over his garden, clearly healthy and seeding readily and delicious.  However, Hugo did remind us that for reliable results, we should ferment the tomato seeds (from the basket of tomatoes that he generously allowed us to pick!), not dry them, prior to germinating them in our garden.  We’d found our wild tomato! 

Hugo regards nature as his teacher and, over the past 25 years, has transformed a steep mountainside into a series of terraced gardens, just like in Peru, where the (now) rich, composted soil produces an amazing array of edible plants.  He collects all the water from the rooftops and directs it into holding tanks, where it is recycled back throughout the garden and into fish ponds.  His septic system produces gas for his kitchen and treated water further down the mountain, which flows crystal-clear into a stream.  Hugo doesn’t recognize any plants as ‘weeds’; all plants have organic value at least.  And most have much more value to man than that; it just requires a little observation and study to discover it.  He explained that every problem on the tropical, organic farm can have very simple solutions, if you just stop to think about it – how to conserve seeds, recycle hydroponic water, produce fertilizer, and so much more, to make your farm more productive and ecologically sound. 

You can learn more about Permacultura Pico Blanco by contacting Hugo and Norma at email:  picoblaco@ice.co.cr
Or take a look at their website: http://Sites.google.com/site/montniveus

It’s clear to all that I’ve been thinking a lot about gardens and weeds lately.  Yes, I just finished Richard Mabey’s delightful book called ‘Weeds’, and it just brought back the whole English realm of gardens, gardening and gardeners.  We used to go to England regularly for Pubs & Gardens tours – Gerry picked the pubs and I chose the gardens.  I loved them all but grew increasingly more fond of the natural, woodland ‘gardens’, such as in the Lake District - natural, free-flowing plantings.  As time went on, and after visiting possibly hundreds of gardens worldwide (but mostly in England – oh! the English and their gardens), I felt certain that you just cannot improve on nature.  The most breathtaking places on earth are natural woodlands.  Humans can create stunning gardens – but we can’t improve on natural succession. 

Reserva El Tigre is mostly forest – left to nature – with the gardens confined to near the house and the solar panels.  Over the last several years, the garden has evolved, as I evolved as a gardener, from exclusively exotic ornamentals to a mix of edibles and mostly native ornamentals.  Volunteers popping into the garden – called weeds by those who maintain designed gardens - are mostly welcomed to our free-form, somewhat chaotic world of green.  It turns out that some of the ‘ho-hum’-looking plants that unexpectedly appear in the garden can have great value.  In fact, a large clump of a rather weedy-looking shrub, Witheringia solanacea (yes, the tomato family again!) has brought students here from the University of Costa Rica, avidly collecting it for their research – yet another effort to seek the true value of weeds!

      

Mr. B's Story

So here’s how it all went down, at least as Mr. B later recounted his story to us - hysterical and true!  Gerry has heard Mr. B repeat this story a few times and laughs just as heartily as the first time he heard it!  And now the word is out!  Here’s how it was that night in Escazu:

There had been a robbery in the neighborhood the day before, so Mr. B. brought his guard dog home from his business establishment for a few nights to protect his house.  As he told Mrs. B, the dog will bark and chase off anybody who tries to jump the fence into the garden.  And the next door neighbor also reassured Mrs. B that, if any intruder gets past the dog, then he would get out his gun and scare the thieves off!

So that soothes Mrs. B’s nerves and so, after dinner, she goes to bed.

Meanwhile, Mr. B goes outside on the front porch for a smoke and a nightcap, watching his dog loll about in the garden.  The bar at the end of his cul-de-sac was bellowing out the usual music for the usual crowd (a highly questionable bunch – at best…).  But Mr. B is used to the racket; it’s just the normal background noise on his street.

Suddenly, Mr. B watches somebody’s hand slip through the fencing but realizes that it’s an employee from his shop, who knows the dog well, walking by outside.  So, the boy pokes his hand through the fencing for the dog to sniff and whispers some sort of doggy endearment to it.

However, Mrs. B couldn’t sleep, hears something, looks out of the window, sees a hand coming through the fence, and starts shouting – very loudly...  The dog then starts barking (the employee having rapidly disappeared, of course); the neighbor gets his gun and begins shooting into the air!  Well, now all the people at the bar run out, accompanied by much shouting and furor, scrambling over each other to get away (not knowing who was the target of the armed attack, but almost all with good reason to think it was them…) tearing down the street past Mr. B’s house.  And then, just to add further confusion, a police car that was driving around a couple of streets away, hears the shooting and comes screaming in to investigate, producing the usual, age-old response :  nobody knows anything; nobody was there; and, if they were there, nobody has a gun…  And so, finally, everybody goes back to bed.

However, as Mr. B recounted to us with a big smile on his face, he is still the only one who knows what really happened that night…

For Sale: Little Gerry

 Little Gerry (the calf) was born on Big Gerry’s (the husband’s) birthday last March.  Big Gerry had originally destined Little Gerry for the freezer and thus, for the past 18 months, the calf has been living an idyllic, pastoral life until the day would come when… “You won’t even know what’s happening, Little Gerry”….thwack.  However, this is Costa Rica, and so the long saga began.  Thank you everyone for all the logistics help related to a 4H-approach to knowing where your food comes from:  certifications, timbres, refrigerated transport to hygienic facility, professional butcher, vacuum sealing and, voila – ready for the freezer. 

But, “What were we thinking???”   

We don’t even have a freezer with the capacity for Little Gerry!  We are 100% Solar Power.  And what really made us question our sanity was this:  we rarely eat red meat anyway – no matter how excellent the quality!

Why not keep Little Gerry as a pet?  I learned that lesson the hard way.  Bovines are not equines!  They are a lot more trouble!  The short answer is to read the book:  “A Naturalist on a Tropical Farm”, by Alexander Skutch.  I read his warning on keeping bovines – the flies, the torsalos, the broken fencing.  Cows are vagabonds – but did I heed his warning?  Of course not; ‘stupid me’ had to learn my own lesson the hard way.  Of course, nowadays we have modern methods for controlling pests, as well as traditional ones – like stable hens chomping down on larvae and insects – but it’s a continuous battle to keep pests under control in the tropical forest.  And we always have to think about resistance.      

So what was I thinking?  Well, things always have a way of cascading.  We just planned on keeping one cow, Lola La Vaca, for her milk, and we just vaguely, kind-of, destined her future calves for the freezer.  We didn’t really think much about the how and the why until we got started with the logistics.  And that’s when the saga began.  Little Gerry was Lola La Vaca’s second calf and, at the time, I was really keen on making our own cheese and yoghurt.  So we were just beginning to experiment with her natural bacteria for cheese-making when she died.  Much to our shock, she died from an infection, a week after the traumatic, caesarean delivery of her third calf, stillborn, on Easter Sunday. 

And that put an end to bovine cheese-making!  I thought briefly about goats – goat yoghurt is wonderful – but right now I’m taking a break from animal husbandry - and home-made, milk-based products!  Now I’m taking the path of least resistance and staying with organic gardening and just doing battle in the plant world.  Biodiversity is the key to organic gardening in the tropics:  mix many plants together; include lots of pest-attracting natives, like Tuete; and go with the flow.  Stick with plants that thrive and don’t slave over plants not suited for the location or that require too many resources to keep alive.

Some weeks ago, back when I was feeling a bit glum about having to give up on yoghurt pro-biotics, fellow gardener, Hugo Zuniga, introduced me to plant pro-biotics:  Water Kefir, gelatinous masses of beneficial bacteria and yeasts (also called Japanese Water Crystals, Ginger Beer Plant, Snow Lotus, Tibicos and other names).  I had lots of fun playing with recipes – trying to make it more palatable, so that somebody besides just me would drink it, but nobody really liked it - except the ants, which just love tapa dulce and completely invaded the kitchen!  So now Yaneth is grumpy and the Water Kefir is in our little freezer.

We haven’t completely eliminated animals, however!  The horses have adapted very well to forest-living and, now that the guys have built a proper enclosure for our chickens, they have begun to breed and thrive.  It’s fascinating to watch chickens – the protective mother, the pecking order.  But then, I’ve been observing insects lately – even having conversations with them, “Stay off my basil”!

Insects are the big problem here in the tropical garden, not so much ‘weeds’.  I’m currently reading this book about Weeds, by Richard Mabey.  He describes the correlation of weed behavior with human behavior:   humans, by reducing biodiversity, enclosing the Commons, introducing mono-culture, and applying chemicals, allowed only the toughest plants to survive, irritate, vex and plague humankind; who are now determined to eradicate the pest that they helped to create!  Mabey is a fun-to-read, botanical author like Michael Pollan; fun reading but with many insights.  The weeds we have in the tropics are mostly exotics that escaped from gardens, although the Pro-Nativa organization has recently been quite effective in guiding Costa Rican gardeners to plant native plants, rather than foreign ones.

So, the upshot is, we have no freezer for Little Gerry.  Do you want to buy Little Gerry for your freezer?  He is a natural grass-fed animal, who is in very good condition, unlike most cattle in this country.  Big Gerry is very unhappy about this but has agreed that it makes most sense to sell him – even though he threatened to put me in the freezer for prematurely whetting his appetite…