green pastures

These days, since it’s so hot out, we let the chickens run around the east side yard for about an hour, while we’re watering some of our new plantings along the perimeter fence. Ok, its not exactly a green pasture, per se, but it is pretty green, and with the grass, and the shade of the pecan trees, it’s pretty darn pleasant!

Here’s the side yard (I told you it was green!):

And here are the chickens enjoying themselves:

Sweetie, being a naughty chicken, standing on the picnic table:

Spotty-dotty, as she contemplates nibbling on the fig vine:

Polka-dotty2, hunting for tasty tidbits in the grass:

Tweetie, looking a little scraggly (- she’s currently molting):

Brownie, looking a little stunned ( I actually had taken a terrific photo of her just previously, looking up at me, but I forgot to turn of f the flash, so she wasn’t willing to look straight into the camera after that)…:

tomatoes, part 2

Sorry for the delay in posting! Anyway…

Other varieties of tomatoes we currently have in the garden, are:

Black Krim – My personal favorite, as far as taste, and appearance. This russian heirloom variety is considered a “black” tomato- which just refers to its coloring. It’s a relatively soft tomato, and a very “tomato” taste- not too sweet- if anything, a little salty. We’ve planted it before, and its probably the one of the few varieties that we’ll plant every year- it seems to do very well here, both prolific and able to tolerate most of the heat, with a little helpful shade in late summer… One of the best things is that the color seems to fool the wild birds- its not as red as some of the other tomato varieties we’ve got in the garden.

Early Girl -  This is one of the only two non-heirloom tomatoes we planted in the garden this year. Thomas Keller mentioned this tomato in his Bouchon cookbook, so we planted it- but frankly, I wasn’t that impressed. The most impressive thing about it was that it really was an early tomato- it was our first variety to start ripening, and it was pretty prolific. The tomatoes were bright red, and you really had to wait until they were completely red- not a tinge of orange, otherwise they would be a little tart. I’m not sure if we’ll plant this again next year- it was a decent tomato, and certainly better than anything you get in the store, but not the best one we grew!

Yellow jelly bean tomato – This was our other non-heirloom variety- and it was terrific! We decided to plant this yellow grape tomato instead of the sungold, which is the yellow cherry tomato we’ve done before. Once again, its another one that you have to wait until its actually almost orange (instead of yellow) before you pick it- in order for it to taste sweet! The chickens really like the yellow tomatoes- both this variety and the yellow pear- for some reason, they found the red ones a little disturbing…

Red Zebra -  This is the red version of the green zebra. This one started out really well, but once we reached 110F, the fruit started to get blossom end rot. Still, it’s a terrific tomato, tasty, a little tart, prolific, and very attractive! (Although almost everyone who saw it first asked if there was something wrong with the tomato…) B’s mom had a good name for them- she kept calling them “tiger tomatoes!”