Food – Our technological infirmity

Tomatoes in the South

Twenty-one years ago in 2005, I wrote this post about growing tomatoes. At the time we were growing tomatoes on a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. I first helped my mother with her tomatoes in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina. We have also grown them in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and coastal North Carolina where I once harvested 100 tomatoes in a day.

For the last four years we have been growing them back in the Piedmont in Davie County, about thirty minutes from those Lewisville tomatoes. In 2024, I grew over four hundred eighty Cherokee Purple tomatoes from just six plants. This year we are planting just three or four plants. I have updated the post where necessary, but growing tomatoes doesn’t change very much. The key to get lots of tomatoes is pruning. I will cover that in another post.

Growing tomatoes is one of the great pleasures of living in the south. Most years they are easy to grow and almost every house has enough sunshine and dirt to grow a bountiful crop somewhere.

Today we planted eight plants which will give us more than we will ever be able to eat.

My goal is to have ripe tomatoes by the Fourth of July which is a little bit of a challenge up on the mountain. (We regularly have ripe tomatoes by the middle of June in Piedmont. On the coast, our first ripe tomato often came in late May.)

We have planted tomatoes many times before, and this year (2005) we have the plants in the ground about one week early and the soil seems relatively warm which is very important in getting a good start.

Assuming we have the right amount of warmth, we have a good chance of having that first tomato sandwich before the Fourth. One of my cardinal rules for growing tomatoes is that you have to get your hands dirty and feel the dirt. In fact feeling the dirt tells you if it is too cool or too wet. We have been growing tomatoes in the same spot for many years so our dirt is in great shape. It crumbles easily and we control disease by a meticulous clean-up at the end of the season.

Originally we dug out most of the dirt and replaced it. For several years we tilled it and worked it. Now we just stick a shovel in, make a hole about the size of a large coffee cup, pour a cup of water in the empty hole, once the water disappears, put in the bottom of the hole about a cup or two of very well rotted cow manure/compost and a sprinkle of Osmocote.

With a trowel I mix the dirt I have taken out of the hole with the manure and fertilizer and put the tomato plant in the hole and pat the dirt around it while making a slight depression around the plant so it will be easy to water.

You do not have to make a large hole unless you have a tomato plant that is so large that you need to put it partially in a trench. A plant twelve inches tall can easily have the branches cut off of the first six inches and the tomato planted so that only six inches is above ground. The plants done that way grow very strong, are wind resistant, and tolerate dry conditions a little better.

Just make certain that you really make a connection with the soil. It’s good for the soul and will make you appreciate all the effort that goes into growing our food. Mixing the soil with your hands is good for the soul.

After transplanting, the plants need to be well watered immediately. After a week or so, I start using Miracle-Gro soluble tomato fertilizer a couple of times a month. As the plants get bigger we stake them, but I will record that a little later just so this is complete guide to tomatoes for my kids. Sometimes you get some little flies on the plants and need to treat them with an organic spray or the plants can be so weakened that they die.

You can choose to use completely natural fertilizers if you want, we have done that many times, but find that with our well cared for soil, this compromise method works very well.

(As to varieties, the absolute tastiest is the Cherokee Purple. They grow well in North Carolina, but you will likely not have much trouble finding good varieties for your area when you go to buy plants. If you can find an old time garden store, they will have far more useful advice than Lowe’s or one of the other big box stores. I can recommend Better Girl, Mortgage Lifter, and for smaller tomatoes, Umberto or Huskies which are exceptionally hardy and easy to grow. The German pinks are good but they take a lot of space for the amount of tomatoes they produce.)

Pictures from when we built our current garden in 2023 and had a bumper crop of tomatoes. That year we grew some of our plants from seed.

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes, ready for the garden April 2026

Food, Post Pandemic

A feast that did not take a lot of cooking

It has been years since I spent significant time in the big cities so I cannot vouch for the state of restaurants outside the rural world of North Carolina’s Piedmont. We have some good restaurants here, but with few exceptions, most can be faulted on something, service, price, or even the quality of the food.

Like many families since the pandemic, we have cut back our in-restaurant eating drastically. We have been disappointed so many times that we often choose to not go back.

Our home-cooked meals have for the last few decades been exceptional. We were fortunate enough to eat wonderful fish like red drum and flounder fresh from the waters of the White Oak River where we lived from 2006-2021. The fish I caught was often supplemented with vegetables from our own garden.

We know what good food is. We understand what it looks like and how it tastes.

For a decade we had a cattle farm and raised most of our own food. Our kids grew up on unpasteurized Guernsey milk that I got from Rosie, our cow, every morning. Our freezer was full of beef. We had our own chickens which provided us with eggs even when they had only snow for their water.

We had wild red raspberries that grew along the rock piles by our fields. There were plenty of blueberries to be had in the fall and a wonderful strawberry u-pick near us. There were still a few wild strawberries around in those days. We harvested Chantelle mushrooms from our woods and fiddlehead greens from our marshes. My wife made butter, yogurt, and lots of homemade oatmeal bread.

Times have changed, we left our farm in 1984. We are a lot older but we still love good food. We still garden but it is only supplemental to what we buy from farmers, farmers’ markets and grocery stores. We also have relatives that garden. In 2024, I grew enough tomatoes to sell a few pounds, pay for seeds/plants and still have plenty to enjoy and share with friends.

We have all the tools we need to cook well from a sous vide stick to a gas grill, a wood pellet smoker, an Instapot, and an induction stove. The challenge is that the older you get, the less time you want to spend cooking and cleaning up. If you don’t like to cook and are not excited by going out, you have to get creative.

We use our cooking energy sparingly, often working to cook something that will last a few days. If I smoke something, we might eat off it for four or five days or until it ends up in the soup pot. A pot of beans or crowder peas will last at least as long. When I bake sourdough bread which I have been doing for over fifty years, it is usually three or four pounds of bread. We always freeze most of what I bake.

Even so there comes a time when the spirit to cook needs a rest. We have learned very little take out food even the good stuff travels well. Pizza needs to come from a place as close as possible, certainly not more than ten minutes away and it is still just pizza. Burgers are better eaten in the parking lot.

Chinese and Mexican food just don’t travel well. Even rotisserie chicken is a gamble and often too salty. The one food we have found that travels well is barbecue or smoked meat. We are lucky to live in the North Carolina where the real wood smoked stuff is plentiful.

A recent meal had crowder peas that were given to us by relatives and cooked by my wife. The brisket and smoked-pulled chicken, and collards came from Honky Tonk Smokehouse in Winston-Salem, NC. Honky Tonk is one of the hidden gems in the Triad area. The baguette was from Camino Bakery in Winston-Salem. It was a delicious takeout meal supplemented by some of our cooking and bread from a good local bakery. It is the way we have learned to give ourselves a cooking break post pandemic – find something that travels well and build a meal around it.

Our Quirky Family Food

Years ago people ate what the cook, usually the mother of the family, put in front of them. When I was at boarding school, you ate what was on the table or went for the jar of peanut butter. It is interesting look back at not only what we ate but how our tastes have changed. Driving around the country in my teens taught me you could have ketchup with you eggs. Going to military school in Tennessee introduced me to grits and unfortunately powdered scrambled eggs.

A lot of today’s foods weren’t around when I was growing up. I still remember my first fast food restaurant, a Burger King, near Winston-Salem in the late fifties. Mostly we ate at home which in the South meant fried chicken on Sunday and lots of vegetables during the week.

My mother canned a lot, and she also froze some vegetables. We had relatives with bigger gardens and freezers than ours so we were never out of vegetables We ate a lot of Pinto beans and cornbread. I learned to love cabbage. Excitement when I was young was a Chef Boyardee Pizza kit. I didn’t have a real pizza until freshmen year in college.

After college on our farm in Canada, my wife and I were lucky to grow most of our food. I was the seventies and early eighties. There were hippies afoot but we were serious famers with tractors and lots of cattle. When we lived in Nova Scotia, we picked broccoli in five gallon buckets and rushed fresh picked corn to already boiling water in the kitchen. We gambled on tomatoes but ones ground on the shore of Nova Scotia were nothing like North Carolina tomatoes. New Brunswick had more heat which better tomatoes, more reliable corn and less broccoli.

Eating out when you were running a farm far from town and have three kids was maybe a trip to the one McDonald’s on a run to town or a stop by the Chinese restaurant that was usually deserted enough for the kids to run around and play. With a farm there was always beef in the freezer and my wife put up something north of one fifty jars of vegetables each year and froze plenty to go with that and fill our two big chest freezers. We hauled out of the cellar each year four times the number of potatoes that we ate.

My early years in North Carolina were different than when our kids were growing up. I never remember asking for something different than what was on the table. When our children grew up in Virginia, there were so many grilled cheese sandwiches and dippy eggs that I sometimes felt like a short order cook.

Our tastes started evolved as we started grilling salmon but we never gave up on canned salmon cakes which were always a staple when growing up. I never gave up on Codfish cakes, but my wife never took them and always maintained they were just an excuse to drink a lot of beer. When we could get good seafood, the years in Nova Scotia and our sixteen years on the North Carolina coast, fresh seafood was included as much as the budget allowed or my angling skill would put on the table.

I have always done some of the cooking. My wife claims that she has never cooked my breakfast in over fifty years of marriage. Even the very few times we had pancakes, I always cooked the breakfast meat. Now I am semi-retired, working only three or four days a week, and my wife is unable to do the shopping. I try watch my carbs and my wife has to watch what she eats because of her kidneys. We also have an adult mid-forties son living with us. He will not eat chicken, turkey, or fish. He eats limited amounts of pork, beef, and hotdogs. My wife and I love beans and soups. We have expanded beyond Pintos, eating Anasazi beans and whatever we see that catches our eye on Rancho Gordo’s site. We have older relatives who supply us with a localized version of Crowder peas which we call Joe’s peas since his family has been growing them and saving the seeds for over one hundred years.

We are also fans of cabbage, broccoli, and whatever else that can be sourced locally. My wife and I love local berries and all sorts of apples. Our son will only eat honey crisp apples preferably from Whole Foods. We grow our own tomatoes during the summer and readily admit to loving either plain tomato sandwiches or BLTs.

I am a huge fan of country sausage, country ham, and true country bacon, but the breakfast meat that I eat the most is turkey sausage which no one else in the family will touch. I also love country fresh eggs and rarely buy any from the grocery store.

I started baking sourdough bread in the seventies and my wife took over the bread baking in the eighties until we moved back to the states. I took up sourdough baking seriously again fourteen years ago. Recently to save time and mess, I have been using the Wildgrain par-baked frozen bread service. When I want a loaf of bread, I put a frozen sourdough loaf from the freezer into the toaster oven. It bakes for 21 minutes in the oven and finishes baking another twenty minutes outside the oven. It is very good and very little different in price from the bakery bread I sought out when I didn’t have time to bake.

I enjoy grilling, my favorite food to grill is half-chickens. We have consciously given up on the big steaks that I used to carve up into fillet mignon and a strip steak with a bone. I would buy a couple on special, my wife and son would eat the fillets. I would eat the strips, first hot and then cold sliced in wraps or on a salad. I am also a big fan of smoking food and chicken thighs would be my smoked food of choice.

This is North Carolina so a good third of meals out revolve around barbecue. We try to limit out eating out to one or two meals a week. My wife and I often split a Jersey Mike’s sub while our son can do in a whole one. We sometimes do fried flounder at one the local restaurants and maybe once every three months, I might get some Chinese food and try to go light on the rice.

My wife loves ice cream which I try to avoid but I did have a Dairy Queen cone with her the other day. It was the first Dairy Queen we had seen in the three years that we have been here. That Dairy Queen in Salisbury, NC has been operating in the same spot for 75 years.

Given all that, meal planning and the shopping to make those meals is challenging. My son is always up for a taco and since I have found some good low-carb wraps, I can live with that. My wife makes a great turkey meatloaf based on the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe, I can eat that hot or cold, breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Given all this history perhaps the hotdogs and steak at the top of the post make a little sense. My wife and son had hot dogs and I ate a grass-fed sirloin steak. Neither of them like sirloins. I have one eight ounce steak a month from the Pre company. It usually costs $7.99 on sale which I consider reasonable for the quality. It took me a little experimenting to get it right but I can now cook it perfectly to my taste. In the continuing effort to improve the quality of what we eat, I added red Quinoa to my spinach salad. Usually by this time of year I have switched to the spinach from our garden but something has eaten most of it and the weather hasn’t been kind to the rest of it.

However, Sunday April 28, we had a big lettuce harvest with a small bag of spinach. With an upcoming week of heat, we figured it was time to take what we could and hope for a better season next year. It turned out to be a pretty nice harvest.

This afternoon it was time for another food compromise. My wife was worn out from processing all the lettuce we picked. I had hoped to grill some chicken thighs but I ran out of time. I agreed to a simple dinner. We stuck a frozen baked ziti into the oven. My wife made fresh Caesar salad. A baked a loaf of sourdough from Wildgrain and made some crouton from hotdogs buns. Normally I would veto a pasta and fresh bread at night but I considering the circumstances I went for it. Tomorrow, I will really have to watch my carbs but not until after breakfast.