Bubba
Sep 24, 2003, 2:55 PM
Post #11 of 15
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Re: [Kip] Home grown fruits and veggies
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This reminds me of another forum where the question was posed as to what viewers missed most about their home countries. Now I know for me anyway; true heirloom tomatoes.
We lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years before retiring down here and my wife and I, who are from France and Alabama respectively, remember both the excellent tomatoes in those areas in our youths and the incredible heirloom tomato industry that developed in Northern California over the past few years.
When we decided to retire here, we were excited about what we thought would be excellent fresh vegetables generally available (NOT!) - especially tomatoes. We were very disappointed in the tomatoes. It seems that the dreaded and tasteless Roma is the primary tomato available here and tomatoes in general are rather tasteless in Highland Jalisco.
So, in a stroke of genius, we decided to grow our own heirloom varieties in deep pots on our roof. Our neighbor, who is an excellent gardener and career Texas farmer, warned us that he had had no luck growing tomatoes here but we proceeded to plant a number of really good heirloom varieties anyway.
Well, our first year was a disaster. The tomato plants looked great and then went to hell on us with the tomatoes rotting away just before full maturity. This year we tried again with much more attention to detail. We got a lot of tomatoes but found them all to be too acidic and bland - even the (supposed to be) super sweet cherry tomatoes.
We have decided to give up and consider great tomatoes to be a thing of the past.
Does anyone out there grow really great heirlooms in Mexico?
Maybe the heat here in Ajijic at 5,000 feet is not intense enough to sweeten the tomatoes properly. In my native Alabama, wonderful tomatoes are available roadside in early summer. In Northern California where early summer is cool, the season for herlooms starts in September. Those seasons represent points in time characterized by intense heat for weeks preceding the harvest. Maybe the hot season here is simply too short. Perhaps there are diseases requiring constant fumigation.
Any ideas?
Oh, and another thing. When we lived on the Alabama coast, we noticed that the bulk of the fresh seafood brought in daily from the gulf went directly north to places like Chicago where premium prices could be charged rather that to local markets unless one went down to the bay when the shrimpboats came in and bought seafood on the spot. A Mexican friend whose brother is a farmer in the Sayula area told us that all of the really good tomatoes raised in that area were shipped off to the United States because of its insatiable market but that, this year, we could expect to see a dramatic improvement in the quality of tomatoes available locally because the U.S. was punishing Mexico for failing to support it in its Iraq war by refusing shipments. Sure enough, a few weeks later tomatoes-on-the-vine and other (slightly) superior products started showing up in Ajijic for the first time since we have been here.
See; war is not necsessarily hell for everybody.
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