Why can't I find good tomatoes?
- Thread starter Niflmir
- Start date
Here in Gopherland, now that Summer is long gone, you can't find any good tomatoes in the supermarkets. I wonder where the stores get their supply at this time of year. They are so lacking in taste and texture.
Yeech.
Yeech.
We buy excellent hot house tomatoes at safeway, they taste
great, a little expensive, but it is winter afterall.
great, a little expensive, but it is winter afterall.
They're factory-farmed mutants, bred for thick skins and long shelf life, not to taste good, from California, Texas, Mexico, and so on. At my local Safeway, however, I can usually get greenhouse-grown tomatoes on the vine from Medicine Hat and Redcliff in Alberta. You pay a premium, and they're still not as good as home grown (nothing's as good as home grown), but they're certainly far superior to the tasteless mutants from farther south. Unfortunately it wasn't a good summer for home grown tomatoes where I live, far too cool and wet, so I've got only about a quarter as much in the freezer as I usually do, but the few pasta and pizza sauces I'll be able to make from that I will savour with lip-smacking hedonism.:smile:
Locally here we have Stokdijk tomatoes. Largest greenhouse in NS. I like their yellow tomatoes.
I'd personally like to get my hands on some of the wild germplasm. Growers used to have some particular frankenstein tomatoes, with some genetically engineered product. But then they tried breeding the wild tomatoes with the selected agricultural strains, and found that they could get better yield, better resistance to pests, and I assume I could get more flavour than they could with the molecular genetics product.
There was a Russian geneticist who made it his life work to document where the centers of origin were for many agricultural plants. Nikolai Vavilov wanted to help feed the world by breeding the domestic strains with the wild, to get fantastic improvements in yield. With so much selective breeding the alleles are fixed. That means that the opportunity for making gains, with such limited genetic variability, are slim to none.
Unfortunately for Nikolai, he had a falling out with the ruling Stalinists, and he ironically died of starvation in a Soviet prison. All for criticizing non-mendellian genetics, which ultimately failed.
I'd personally like to get my hands on some of the wild germplasm. Growers used to have some particular frankenstein tomatoes, with some genetically engineered product. But then they tried breeding the wild tomatoes with the selected agricultural strains, and found that they could get better yield, better resistance to pests, and I assume I could get more flavour than they could with the molecular genetics product.
There was a Russian geneticist who made it his life work to document where the centers of origin were for many agricultural plants. Nikolai Vavilov wanted to help feed the world by breeding the domestic strains with the wild, to get fantastic improvements in yield. With so much selective breeding the alleles are fixed. That means that the opportunity for making gains, with such limited genetic variability, are slim to none.
Unfortunately for Nikolai, he had a falling out with the ruling Stalinists, and he ironically died of starvation in a Soviet prison. All for criticizing non-mendellian genetics, which ultimately failed.
You can always get one of those AeroGarden's and grow fresh tomatoes in your home all year round.
Next time you're in Italy, bring back some tomatoes, as much as you can! Do like Dex and plan ahead. Not sure what kind of ice box you have in your apartment though.
Dad had a hanging basket last year that he bought in Claresholm...I'd estimate that monster produced enough to fill a ten gallon pail twice over. Little cherries, I brought a bag in my lunch every day!
Here's a picture of the plant before we hung it outside:
Yummm!
I would love to grow my own in my apartment but our building has bugs and I'm afraid of attracting them in my unit because of the greenery. Some of my neighbors do plant their own but then they complain of infestation. Ugh - not worth the extra headaches.
All kinds of bug - mites, roaches, ants, fruit flies. The latter are worse because they attract bats.
I think that the species of bats we have hibernate in winter but that's when mice enter the building to keep out of the cold winters. Ugh!
Jeepers! Nothing wrong with bats. The more the merrier. Toms do really well under artificial light and they won't attract any bugs.
Lol! Put out a Welcome sign, show 'em your hospitality, and you'll have some Happy Bats!
in this area the species of bats we have esp like fruit flies which are attracted by tomatoes - once people in our building removed the plants they had far less bug & bat infestation