Eino Kenttä

Oh, and Nancy - are your plants still alive, or did you get frost? I noticed this year that the fruits keep growing, albeit slowly, even at cool temperatures (we had a lot of 12 degrees C in August).

The 2025 tomato growing results are here, and it basically boils down to SUCCESS!

So, to start at the end of the story, I just opened up most of the tomatoes, which were harvested before we left the land for the year (end of September), and have been after-ripening indoors for about three weeks. It was a bit nervous, many of them looked ripe, but I was half expecting that the seeds would all be tiny, shrunken things since the fruits were harvested unripe. As it turns out, some, but not all, of the direct-seeded ones (which was most of them this year) did have a fair few tiny shrunken seeds, but almost all of the fruits that looked to be anywhere near full size also had some good-looking seeds. Yay!!!

Back to the beginning. I started the growing year in late May, by sowing a massive disorganized mix of tomato seeds. I also planted out the two best plants from last year, which were kept alive indoors over winter. The seeds germinated okay, even though it took a while. Then nothing much happened for the next month or so, with either the direct-seeded plants or the transplanted ones, due to an unusually cool and rainy June. We went around most of the month hoping for a shift in the weather, and, well... Careful what you wish for, it might come true.

A week or so into July, it stopped raining, and the temperatures went up to around 30 C. Then it stayed like that for a month. I'm not joking, we did not get ONE DROP OF RAIN in a MONTH. On the Norwegian coast. There were a few thunder storms, but they all passed us by. I think the maximum temperature was 34 C. A neighbour, who's been living in the area his whole life, said he's never seen anything like it.

The heat was a very mixed blessing. On the one hand, it was too hot to get much done in the daytime (for us wimpy cold-weather people), we had to be extremely careful with fire, and we had to haul water to our hilltop garden every day. On the other hand, it was brilliant to go swimming every day, and some plants got a real kick. Including the tomatoes.

The first of the tomato plants started flowering in the end of July (I think). One interesting thing is that the transplanted plants didn't really start flowering much earlier than the direct-seeded. There might have been a couple of days difference between one of the overwintered plants (almost certainly 'Blue Ambrosia') and a few of the earliest direct-seeded.

Since I sowed all the seeds intermixed, I don't really have anything except educated guesses when it comes to what's what. The first direct-seeded plant to start flowering was a yellow cherry tomato of some kind (no idea what it might be called). Then there were several potato-leaved plants that developed what looked like small, red beefsteak tomatoes. These might have been lofthousers, since I don't know that I got seeds for anything else beefsteak-like. Some sort of wild tomato, probably a cheesmaniae, was also among the earliest.

In order to stir up the genetics, I emasculated one or a couple of flowers on each plant once a few plants had started flowering, scraped some pollen off each anther cone, and dabbed mixed pollen on each stigma. This was done twice, with a week or so between. I also put pollen on the exposed stigma of other 'Blue Ambrosia' flowers.

A bit into August, the weather did another complete U-turn, and it went back to being mostly cool and rainy. The tomato plants didn't seem to mind too badly, the fruits kept growing, although the leaves on many plants started looking quite sad after a while.

The weather stayed cool and rainy until the end of August, when it turned again, and we got a mostly warm September. None of the tomatoes really developed any colour until a week or so after being harvested and moved indoors. Some are still ripening (notably the wild tomato mentioned above) so I'll give them a bit more time. The rest have had their seeds harvested and set to ferment.

All in all, the weather this year was definitely not "normal", so I don't know if this will work as well a more ordinary summer. I'll take any help I can get this early in the process, though. Hopefully, there are some hybrids between the earliest-blooming individuals among the seeds, so the population next year might be a bit better adapted. Fingers crossed!

Ooh, that's clever! I also ran into this problem, and ended up sort of avoiding it by not jumping on the shovel and instead just hacking away using my arm muscles. It works, but it is a bit tiring. I might need to build something like this.

Kathleen Sanderson wrote:
The kale - I'm not sure about. It's a good choice in a lot of respects. Daughter tolerates sauerkraut well (and dill pickles); it seems likely that kale could be made into sauerkraut, though it would be a little different....

In my very limited experience, kale is no good for sauerkraut. It makes a horrible-smelling mess. I've understood that this happens when what you ferment contains too many leafy greens (too much chlorophyll maybe?) compared to the amount of available carbs. I remember reading a book where someone described the smell as "the most horrible dead thing you can imagine", but I personally thought it smelled more like some kind of poo. Hopefully someone with more fermentation experience than me will chime in. A thought occurs to me though: If the problem really is the ratio of chlorophyll to carbs, then a mix of kale and sunroots might work just fine? Hmm...

Nice project! Would love to participate, but unfortunately our summers are mostly a bit too cool for sunflowers to reliably set ripe seeds, I think. (We haven't really tried a lot yet, though.)

What about girdling? Remove a strip of bark all around the trunk, scratch the wood underneath the bark to remove the cells which would otherwise make new bark. The root system will keep feeding the top with water and minerals (and some stored sugars I think) since that transport goes through the xylem, but won't get any sugars back from the top, since the downward transport goes through the phloem which was cut away. The result is that the root will starve to death eventually.

1) The ambition is to landrace everything. So far, among the annuals we've started a bit with tomatoes and buckwheat. Also saving seeds for peas (so I suppose the process might have started there as well, although they are barely outcrossing at all I believe?) and true potato seed (but the actual growing of them will probably need to wait until we're more settled on our land). Next year we hope to get seeds from kale and carrots, if they survive the winter. All the nut and fruit trees will be grown landrace style, we're working on getting as much genetic diversity as we can.

2) Everything we can get that doesn't have any major obvious undesirable traits. No F1 hybrid carrot varieties due to cytoplasmic male sterility, no manchurian walnuts in the butternut/heartnut/Japanese walnut mix because the nuts are just too tiny and thick-shelled to bother with (although the extra cold hardiness would be nice... Might have to think again about that.)

3) Survival first, then fruiting, then we'll see about the rest.

4) Coastal mid-Norway, latitude 64 north, mostly rainy and cool summers, mild autumns, not very cold winters. Starting from spruce forest, so soils mainly quite acidic, working on improving matters in our growing areas.

Next year I plan to try co-growing climbing peas with sunroots, so the sunroots act as a climbing frame for the peas, and the peas feed the sunroots nitrogen. I seem to remember someone on here (Thom, maybe?) saying they grew sunflowers as a climbing frame for beans, and that they were doing well, so sunroots and peas feels like a combination that might work. Also, I have heard of people growing sunroots and aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus) together, for the same reason.

Okay, crazy idea to make the concrete a bit lighter: What if you use charcoal as part of the aggregate, instead of sand? I've been playing around a little bit with making cob with char instead of sand, and it seems decently strong. Though I suppose if you're going to cover the dome with soil or similar, "decently strong" might not be quite enough...

My mother-in-law has a wonderful recipe for a chestnut and pumpkin soup.  It's a blended soup, containing nothing but chestnuts, pumpkin/squash and vegetable stock. Cream can be added, but is optional. She mainly uses canned chestnuts, so if you start from fresh they'll have to be precooked in the oven (20 minutes at 220 degrees C apparently, cut a slit in the shell before so they don't explode) and then peeled.

Use about half a peeled mid-sized winter squash or pumpkin (my mother-in-law tends to use butternut squash) for about 500 grams of peeled chestnuts. Chop the squash, put in a pot with just enough water to cover the pieces, and boil until soft. Add the chestnuts, boil another 5-10 minutes. Blend the soup and season. The recipe comes from the Ardèche region in France, where chestnuts are traditionally a staple.