Tales from Easement Acres
Owing to the combination of revised gardening techniques and tons of rain, my prize tomato for the year turned out to not be the usual first fruit the vine sets. The brandwine churned out many others, and one of particular note exceeded my premature title-granting. This, as it turns out, is the prize tomato of 2026:
20.1 oz! Much bigger indeed.
Here’s the recap:
So while still not the record, it came much closer.
–Simon
The gardens grow quick this time of the season. By the time I get around to a garden post on my twice-weekly blogging cadence, the pictures are out of date. That’s when I usually fall back on a bulk picture post, but even on my own blog, with as much as I love my gardens, that approach seems lazy. Besides which, with the blog approaching 10 years, garden pics aren’t difficult to find here in the archives. So instead, I’ll just point out the unusual, rather than the usual.
The candidate for this post is a rather peculiar tomato mutation:
I find it to be hilariously vulgar, but you extrapolate your own Rorschach interpretation.
Nature can be freaky.
–Simon
I’ve started to embrace AI engines. The aging crank that I am has been reluctant to jump aboard too soon, but it turns out I was thinking about it all wrong. Instead of using it to lazily bypass the process of basic internet research, as its main purpose appears to be, I discovered that I can instead use it to bypass the bullshit copy/paste non-researched web articles themselves. A simple query returns aggregated, compiled, and distilled information; which I can then use to better refine my internet searches to find the actual information that most websites simply scrape and regurgitate. It was, perhaps, a slow revelationary process on my part.
Here’s a good example. One of my tomato starters had three initial leaves. I had never seen that before. My standard internet searching revealed that these first leaves that reside within the seed are called cotyledons. Sounds like a dinosaur to me, but okay. And as a seasoned gardener, I know that tomato seedlings have two cotyledons, not three. What was going on? It was time for Wikipedia to bestow me with closure.
But it didn’t. It just talked about the leaves themselves and their purpose, though not why there would be a non-standard number on a plant. Genetic mutation? Monsanto? Government conspiracy? Tell me!
But again, it didn’t. So I used an AI engine, and asked it why a tomato seedling would have 3 cotyledons. And it promptly told me that it’s rare, sometimes from genetic mutation, but usually resulting from polyembryony, which happens when more than one embryo forms within a single seed. Furthermore, it’s apparently a non-issue long term, though it causes early variations in normal growth patterns. Now that’s useful information, and also kind of fascinating.
And to drive the point home further, another one germinated, from a completely different variety!
Most of the seeds I plant are ones I’ve saved, so this double occurrence is intriguing. Perhaps attributed to a statistical Poisson distribution, it could be an unintentional result of my decades-long solanum eugenics project.
Whatever the cause, I’ll be keeping a close eye on these samples. Maybe I’ll have developed new varieties! Or, more likely, the bigger achievement here is that I’ve finally dabbled in AI.
–Simon
It would seem that I neglected to highlight last year’s biggest tomato, but here’s the one from 2021:
This year’s was bigger.
That is all.
–Simon
Who doesn’t love a home-grown tomato? Well, I’ve met people who don’t, but I personally think they’re not people but rather some type of The Omen devil-spawn, and no one can change my mind. I am fully prepared to debate this.
So to increase my production of delicious produce and repel demons at the same time, I planted a second row of determinate tomatoes this year, bringing the total to 18, and to compliment the 12 indeterminate tomatoes on the trellis, and the volunteers that pop up throughout the gardens, and the two extra I put in a pot on the deck. I really like tomatoes.
So standby for a selection of seductive solanums! (AKA, tomato porn):
On a more informational note, this was the first time I tried broiling the tomatoes for sauce. The standard blanching/skinning/de-seeding applies, but the flesh is then slightly browned before being added to the pot. I also included a full mirepoix this time too.
I think the broiling somehow also brightened the red color, as my sauces are usually more muted, so bonus. I’ll definitely be taking this approach again.
And I won’t have to wait long. In one week’s time, the bowl has filled again. Pizza sauce next!
–Simon