The Summer Garden Season

This is the last harvest I photographed. The pumpkins were finally coming in--those are the Thelma Sander's Sweet Potato pumpkins and a Winter Luxury Pie pumpkin. They are both so delicious. Since then we've also gotten some massive Blue Hubbard pumpkins and several very nice Galeux D'Eysines, though I haven't taken pictures of them. The tomatoes are still getting ripe, but the pumpkins are mostly over now.

The Okra was just in, with all four kinds this year. Hill County Red, Burgundy, Jade and Silver Queen. I liked all the varieties, but Ethan only likes the Jade kind. It all tastes about the same, but he just likes it to be green.

I love the State Fair zinnias. The are huge and gorgeous, and they last forever in a vase. I am definitely growing these next year.

Catching up

Has it really been a month and a half since I've posted?? Where does the time go?! Since May, lots has happened. It's gotten really, really hot (and dry). This year the summer rains seem to have ceased to exist, unfortunately.

Cloud had her little lamb. He was adorable, while he lasted. We are giving the sheep to our friend Dan in a month or so. They have been such a pain. The lamb is not like the baby goats. He did not recognize his mother apart from Big Dumpling or the dog (unbelievably dumb), which meant that when the stupid dog would get out to go play on the other side of the fence, he would, too. He and the dog were missing one day, and we were sure we had lost him, but then we found them a quarter of a mile away, near the road, and brought them back. Only a week after that, they were missing again, and this time we just couldn't find them. The dog came back, but the lamb didn't. He was so tiny he just slipped right through the 3-strand electric fencing, despite the 7,000 volts. Sad, but then the sheep have been giving us problems all year--like pink eye, and then poor Big Dumpling hasn't been the same since she went to the other farm. I got the Pat Colby lick from Countryside Naturals this time, instead of the usual Fertrell mineral mix, because I think they need more copper. The goats have been so much easier to deal with, shockingly.

And the next bit is that the garden has been fabulous this year. I've never had so much food. Ethan has been complaining a bit about how much he's been expected to eat (he's a meat-and-potatoes-only kind of guy). This was the first, first little harvest of squash blossoms and summer squash and a couple of cucumbers.

The early summer garden 2011

It's early summer and the garden is starting to take off. Just yesterday we ate our first tender little zucchinis, and every day the plants seem to stretch and grow. Here's a little tour of our best garden yet, beginning with the Dark Opal basil I started from seed. I love the beautiful colors of the leaves. We are also growing Lettuce Leaf basil, Spicy Bush basil, Lemon basil, Holy basil and Sweet Genovese basil. I started them just after the tomatoes in January.

Here is a Tashkent marigold. The basil and marigolds are planted between the double row of tomatoes. Next year I might plant them between each plant, because the tomatoes are starting to shade them out.

This is a little patch of Oaxacan Green Dent corn, from Seed Saver's Exchange, growing between the squash plants. I separated the squash plants with rows of corn in hopes that it will give me some time to find squash bugs before they are all over the place. Supposedly it takes squash bugs awhile to get around, so if the squash is isolated it can help control them. They were a major problem the first year. Last year it was stem borer moths. This year I've been keeping a close watch and picking off any squash bug or stem borer eggs I find, and I've already found lots. We even found an adult male stem borer moth on the Cocozelle Zucchini.

A squash flower. I've been picking the extra males and battering and frying them. They are so good!

The yellow crookneck looks like it will be prolific this year. Already it has a lot of female blossoms.

Here is the red amaranth between the squash.

I love the way the moon and stars melons have dappled leaves. They are so pretty.

Here is a Golden Jenny melon. No female flowers yet, but it has a lot of male blossoms. The cucumbers seem to be the first along this row to have female flowers (I planted the melons, watermelons and cucumbers in a long row together, to make it easier to rotate these similar plants). All the melons are doing well. I am so hoping to get a taste of the Delice de la Table melons this year!

The bush beans are becoming a mini forest. I have seen a few blossoms. I can't wait for fresh beans! The pole beans are really coming along, too, although I have no photos of them. The bean pole idea this year seems to have worked well--they are all climbing easily. Last year we used Ethan's idea (failure) of a single top string with strands of twine hanging down for the beans to grow on. What actually happened was that the wind blew all the strands of twine into a single enormous knot that would have Alexander the Great cringing and the poor bean vines groveled among the grasses, didn't make beans and died. So it's been two years since we've had any decent amount of our own beans.

We actually have peppers this year so far. I had wanted to keep them in pots so they could survive the winter, but they were just not very happy. So they are all safely in the ground now, and seeming to enjoy it. We even have a few little peppers just starting to grow.

May

This picture with May and Nougat turned out a lot cuter than the photos of Geranium's oozing horn, so I thought I would just say how big our babies are! Nougat was the first baby born on the farm, and now she is bred to kid in July, and little May, born May 1st of last year, has grown big enough to have her own collar now. She looks so grown up! We are still waiting on this year's babies to be born (any day now we might have pictures of little lambs).

Cow with Fly Strike and Infection after De-horning

I apologize if this post is disgusting. The only reason I am posting about it is because when I looked up "Cows fly strike de-horning" and "Cows infection after de-horning" barely anything came up that was useful. There was certainly nothing about how to treat the situation without antibiotics and pyrethrin.

This was certainly a situation we had created. Although it perhaps violates some laws of Devons to de-horn them (in all the pictures they always have horns), it really had to be done. It wasn't just the way Geranium would run with them pointed four inches from your back when you had a bucket, or the way that she charged at me one day, or how she savaged the hay bale with them. Mostly it was because her attitude with them was just awful. There was just no way I could have milked her every day by myself when Ethan was out of town.

We consulted a vet to make sure it was not going to be too stressful this time of year and during her pregnancy and had her come out for the procedure. We know a guy who just puts them in the head gate and saws the horns off with a wood saw, but this wasn't something we were comfortable with. So the vet came out and even numbed her so it wouldn't hurt. The first one was fairly traumatic for her, and the second one bled quite a lot, but the vet said it was fine. She said not to put anything on it and that it should heal in about two weeks.

It was healing well, and I didn't feel I needed to do anything to help it along until a week later when we got a torrential rain. That afternoon when I went out to do the chores Geranium didn't come running over as enthusiastically as usual. When she got about 10 feet away I smelled an awful smell. When she turned her head I saw the maggots all crawling around and my heart just sunk, because this was what we had been afraid of. It was the beginning of a very disgusting week. We had lost a chicken to fly strike a couple of years ago, and I was so haunted by the experience I looked up everything I could to find out about it so it would never happen again. The result was that I was fairly well-informed about what to do. I didn't have a phone to call the vet or anything, so I immediately got some saline mixed up and waited until Ethan arrived and we could call the vet. The vet didn't answer the phone, so we went out and squirted every last maggot we possibly could out of her head with the saline and a drencher (really, really gross, by the way, especially since she kept shaking her head and spraying us with maggots). Then we called the vet's emergency number and talked to a different vet who had barely even heard of fly strike and had to look it up. She said not to worry, they were just eating necrotic tissue and that we had already done everything the vet could recommend. The only other thing they would do is spray her head down with pyrethrin.

Day 2: I had looked up pyrethrin and was not happy with what I read about it. When we went out the second day, there were some very large maggots still inside the hole of her horn that we flushed out. I think they were the little ones that we had missed and had grown horribly large in just a few hours (their eggs can hatch in under 8 hours in the right conditions and they grow unbelievably fast). I smeared on an ointment I had made from zinc oxide, coconut oil, rosemary essential oil and grapefruit essential oil. I have had luck with this ointment repelling flies from other wounds--particularly udder wounds that had little gnats eating at it that kept it from healing. I thought it would perhaps be more effective than the pyrethrin anyway, since it was oil based and wouldn't wash off easily in the rain, which had started this whole situation. The rosemary oil I added because rosemary was used to keep flies from meat, and the grapefruit was because it is very strong smelling. The maggots secret an enzyme that breaks down the proteins and creates a horrible smell that draws more and more flies in to lay eggs, so covering that up is important.

Day 3: There were no maggots in the affected wound on this day, although I found only a few very large ones on the other side, but no new tiny ones (which are much harder to get off). I put the zinc ointment on both sides this time. The side that had gotten the most of the fly strike now had very thick, smelly yellow mucus or pus pouring out of it. We flushed it again with saline and then called the vet, who strongly recommended antibiotics at this point. Geranium was still eating and acting fine, and I was worried about the antibiotics after reading Pat Colby's section about it where the vet killed her entire goat herd with them. I spoke to my friend of Ochwilla Hill Farm and she told me that her vet would never give antibiotics to a cow at that stage of pregnancy, because it could damage the calf. So we had to find an alternative.

Day 4: No maggots at all this time, but the one side was looking worse than ever. When I looked inside her sinus, all I could see was the thick yellow stuff. This day I added goldenseal tincture to the saline and we flushed it out very well, tipping her head to the side to let it drain out. Then I packed both the horns with Manuka honey and bound it up to keep it all in, smearing the outside with the zinc ointment (the smell was still very bad).

Day 5: The bandage stayed on, and when we removed it the next day it looked significantly better. The honey seemed to have drawn all the infection out, because a lot of yellow stuff poured out when I took off the bandage, but inside her head was clear and I could see it was beginning to heal and close up. I flushed it with goldenseal and saline again, packed new honey in and bound it up. The nasty infected smell was gone, and it just smelled like a wound. I gave her a big dose of fermented cod liver oil and extra raw apple cider vinegar in her water.

Day 6: She managed to rip the bandage off this day, but it was almost for the better, because it dried out the wound nicely. There was still some yellow stuff, but when I flushed it out again with the saline and goldenseal the water ran out her nose for the first time (I think it had been too clogged before). I packed it with honey but didn't bandage it. We gave her another dose of cod liver oil.

Day 7: Both the horns seemed to be healing very well. There was only the tiniest bit of yellow stuff on the one horn. This was the last day we flushed it out. I put the honey on it again.

After this it has gotten better and better. On the 7th evening it rained again, but that was almost good because it cleaned the area up. There was still mucus on both sides, but on the one side it was clear and on the other side a much clearer yellow.

Thank goodness for the herbs and the healing honey.

Piggies

This is a late picture of the pigs from this year. Four of them have already been harvested, and only the four pink ones remain. I wish I had gotten the picture up sooner. The little pink pigs have really been growing quickly since the big pigs are gone. I didn't like having two different sizes/ages of pigs. I think the little ones got shorted on food too much.

Spring and Sprouts

It's already March and we're getting ready for the summer garden. These are the seeds I started back in January. This year we had switched to an out-door set up to let more light in. Ethan built a cold-frame on the south side of the house, and we ran an extension cord out for a heat lamp. It was too cold at first, but I insulated it better with another layer of plastic and nearly everything we planted grew.

As you can see by the crazy tomato rain forest on the left, the tomatoes are doing very well so far. I've had to re-pot them twice! Every time I give them more room they just get larger. I hope the warm weather is here soon, I can't wait to plant them. Some have flowers already.

I just wish I knew what I had done differently this year. It was the same seeds (a year older this time), same starting soil, same pots. The only thing that was different was the cold frame, which was excessively draughty at first.

American Milking Devons

After Honey died we were on the look-out for a new milking cow, but it was a hopeless kind of a search because nothing was for sale around here and it had taken us so long to find Honey in the first place. We had really wanted American Milking Devons (Honey had been bred to a Devon bull), so I looked around for any Devon cows for sale and found some listings. Most of the cows had already been sold, but one desperate-looking listing said "make an offer," and when I wrote to them they said they still had the cows for sale. They were located up in Wisconsin, which required us to find a shipper. They suggested Uship, which is a site which connects shippers and customers. The first offer we had on the shipping was too high, so I asked the people in Wisconsin if they could wait for us to find a better offer. They took a long time to reply and eventually said they wanted to get rid of the cows as soon as possible and that there were other people interested in them. So it seemed we might not get them after all. Then, later that same day, we got another offer that was very affordable and we went ahead and accepted the cows and mailed a check. It was a very tense several days while the people with the cows fumbled around with getting the cows checked at the vet and struggled to cash our cashier's check, for some reason we still don't entirely understand. At last the cows were on their way--thanks the the shipper Rolf--who really had to do most of the dealing with those people. And it still didn't quite seem real. Then at last they were there--on our farm, and we have the sort of cows we have wanted to get for so long. They are just beautiful--Geranium (who is bred for April) and her baby. They are the most beautiful color, and very stocky, with a very pleasing cow-shape. We are so happy!

The Muscovies

We've had the Muscovy ducks for over a year now, but I have yet to say anything about them.

One reason is that they are extremely hard to photograph, as they never hold still enough. Most of the pictures I took were deleted because they showed either brown and white duck-shaped blurs, or the least-favorable end of a duck.

We got them from the same place we get our feeder pigs each year. When we drove up the first time to get our first batch of pigs, ducks were clumped all over the lawn, and strings of little ducklings would pop out from behind shrubberies and corners of buildings and other surprising places. The owner of the place immediately tried to press us into buying some ducks. He had had a buyer from South Florida turn around and decide not to buy the birds once they were all raised up. He said he had already separated the males and females, but the males kept sneaking over to the females' side at night and great numbers of ducklings kept pouring out from every nook and cranny. We declined to buy any ducks at the time, but took note

of the cockroach-like ability they seemed to have to reproduce.

A year later, when we thought we were better set up for more poultry, we bought a mama duck and three babies. They grew up and laid beautiful creamy eggs all year. We recently added four more females to our flock (one of the ducklings had grown up to be a large drake).

They have not begun laying for us yet, but we anticipate a good number of duck eggs (and hopefully ducklings) in the Spring. They are extremely well-adapted ducks, being the same sort that puddle about in retention ponds. They have been kept completely free-ranging, with out being shut-up at all during the night. They are very beautif

ul ducks, and keep distinctly separate from the white Pekings we have not yet eaten yet. They like to huddle together and do their weird mechanical-

duck dance with each other.

We don't have a pond, but they have a trough of water to bathe and splash in. They actually prefer the cow's drinking water, unfortunately, and since their clipped wings have grown in they delight in flying over into other paddocks and causing trouble. A favorite pastime of theirs is to fly just over the dog, who remains barking helplessly on the ground, and then fly back and perch on a post and sit like a duck-shaped carving and listen gleefully to the tortured barking.

Losing a milk cow

I recently told a friend about losing our cow Honey, and she responded with, "Well, most farmers I know are very in touch with life and death and know when to let things go and when things are supposed to die. I suppose you learned a lesson from it."

This comment made me realize that before we had a family cow I would not have understood the incredible impact of such an event and what it would mean for a family to loose their milk cow. Cows are such a distant and abstract animal for most modern urban people, who will always express sorrow if someone looses their cat or dog (who don't even support the family with food--in fact require feeding and vet bills). To say that we lost a cow, to them, must be like loosing a piece of machinery.

To us, loosing Honey was a staggering set-back, because we are so small and just beginning our herd. To us she was family, food, fertility and the hopes of our own herd one day. I begin to contemplate the value of the cow--which was the original stock of the stock market--and I believe the old words for cow express this so well--"Chattle"--meaning wealth--and even before that "Kind" from which the words "Kindred" and "Kindness" come from.

Not only was she our source for richness--milk, cream, butter, and cheese for our children to grow on, but also she produced food for the pigs, the chickens and the turkeys, and her manure fed the garden and we were hoping for a calf next year. And suddenly it was gone, and everyone is deprived. The farm seems a much poorer place without our cow, and our herd is much diminished.

Thankfully, we have goats milk still, and we could obtain milk for ourselves from other places--although at great cost or diminished quality, but I can still sense the tragedy of what it means to lose your cow--a long time ago or in other places it might mean not surviving the winter, or being very hungry at least. I think the most valuable lesson we have learned from this is what an incredible gift of richness the cow is.

A great Change

As a piece of sad news which afflicted us a few weeks ago in November, our milking cow Honey was injured when we were transporting her back from the farm where she was being bred to an American Milking Devon bull. She was down for several days, and I could tell that her leg was swollen. I used a tuning fork and pressed it against her bones to check for fractures, and as far as I could tell it was a soft-tissue injury. I used comfrey and Arnica both topically and homeopathic ally, as well as massage and applications of ice. After about a week of nursing her as she lay unable to stand up, she showed great improvement and was beginning to try to move around again and was making efforts to stand up. Then one day we came out to check on her and do the chores, and she had died. We think perhaps she had a blood clot, as she was showing improvement and died very suddenly.

Then a few days later our little goat Chocolate died. This was a surprise because she hadn't been particularly ill--but it was also not quite so surprising because she was the kid that Ellie would not nurse, and she was weak at birth and could not stand up. As she was growing she was never as healthy as her twin.

The other kid would play and jump and was sleek and fat, but poor little Chocolate was always sickly and bloated and would stand around looking listless. I gave her cod liver oil and kelp and citrus and special treats from the garden, but she continued to look miserable. I often would massage her rumen, which was always bloated and wormed her regularly.

Then, three days after Honey died, we came out to do the chores and little Chocolate was no where to be seen. We found her stretched out on the hay, as if she had been laying down to sleep and didn't wake up.

In my favorite goat book by Pat Colby, Natural Goat Care, she says, "Unthrifty kids should not be raised. Any kid that does not stand up unaided after about twenty minutes is suspect--unless there is a reason for its debility....A kid that is weak for no very good reason should be allowed to die quietly or be dispatched, nature will have her reasons."

We are sad, but we know this was how it was supposed to be.

Radishes

I knew I needed to make a separate post for the radishes. They just do so well here, it's hard to resist planting a lot of them, and they pickle so nicely.

This year I am please to have no fewer than nine types of radishes planted: Daikon, cherry belle, French breakfast, black Spanish, He

lios, plum purple, munchner bier, Misato rose and German giant.

I also added Rat's tail, Chinese red meat and green Luobo radishes.

I like that the radishes are so quick to be ready to pull. And the spicyness goes away when they are salted and fermented.

Usually I quarter and brine the radishes, but this time I grated them with some turnip and carrot--you can see they grat

ed up into a very lovely pickle.

I made three kinds--one plain old "Ed-Chi" (instead of Kim-Chi), named for Ed Sherwood who loves plain, salted and grated radish pickles, one with caraway seeds and one with garlic and ginger.

I just love how incredibly colorful they are when you pull them up out of the ground--they look like bright splashes of paint or rubies and jewels--buried treasure.

The Winter Garden of 2010

This year we began the winter garden without a donkey but with more experience. We had some piles of compost stored away. I opened a barrel we had composted a pig's head and offal in last year, kind of afraid of what I might find. Inside there was some very fine, pleasant-smelling compost and a pig's skull, which is already being gnawed on by the squirrels.

This year I decided to plant a lot of what grew well last year--radishes, turnips, parsnips and greens, and not fuss too much over the things that hate Florida's sandy soils--carrots and beets, namely. I am very pleased to be growing a lot of interesting Asian greens--Tatsoi, Tainong Emperor Heading Mustard, Pak Choy, Japanese Red Mustard, and Komatsuna.

I also have the necessary patch of collard greens and curly mustard, lots of turnips, including some interesting red turnips, which seem to be doing okay. A rabbit has destroyed my crop of snap peas this year. The lettuce, strangely, has had a hard time of it. The Arugula is making up for it, but it is still a bit sad, since I had invested in the Seed Saver's Exchange incredible heirloom lettuce combination. Shockingly, the spinach is actually growing and looking healthy this year, instead of pining away and slowly suffering as it did last year. The golden beets have once again been a huge disappointment, but the bull's blood and Choggia beets are making up for it (really, I can't understand people who don't like beets!).

Fall flowers

The fall flowers were so beautiful this year. The Agalinis (false foxglove) was taller and more beautiful than ever before. It is the host plant of the Buckeye butterfly, and we had swarms of them drifting about, showing off their brown eye spots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junonia_coenia

The scratch daisy was rioting everywhere. It really is a beautiful wild flower. It made the whole orchard and winter garden look like a galaxy with thousands of little yellow stars. When the setting sun shone on everything in the evenings they were almost blinding as I walked by with buckets of soaked oats and corn for the chickens.

Here is a lovely little bouquet Mirin picked for me. The larger yellow flowers are crotalaria. It is a poisonous legume which was widely planted around the beginning of the 20th century because it fixes nitrogen and has nemotacidal properties. Because it has a cumulative heart toxin and is deadly to grazing livestock everyone tries to kill it. We try to pull it out of the pastures, but it comes back every year.

I think it is a beautiful plant, and our animals do eat it, and we have never lost one yet to crotalaria. It made a very nice cut flower.

Wild grapes

I have been seriously slacking off recently with updating Fox Grape Farm. We've been so busy, and since no one actually reads it, the motivation was hard to come up with--so the next few posts are all old photos I didn't get around to posting until now.

Here is a wild harvest--wild muscadine grapes, fox grapes and lactarius mushrooms--yum!

New piglets

We have some new piglets. They are from the same farm we have always gotten them from, but they are certainly different this time. They are lean and have funny long noses, more like wild pigs. They were extremely difficult to photograph because they kept fidgeting and changing places.

At the moment they are in a permanent, smaller hog pen while they get used to the electric fencing, but in a week or so we hope to have them out in movable pastures. We certainly learned our lesson last year when we put the pigs directly into electric fencing and we ended up having a piglet escape and never come back.

More mushrooms...

We found even more delicious mushrooms yesterday. These were just around three or four oak trees. There were lots more, but we didn't want to be greedy. We found some boletes, lots of lactarius and more russelas.

We had the other mushrooms for dinner the other night. They were wonderful. The boletus we had found had a very strong but pleasant mushroomy flavor that would be delicious in a gravy or a mushroom soup. We are so lucky to have all these wonderful fruits of the forest.

I wonder what sorts of minerals you get from eating wild mushrooms.

Here is Mirin, very proud of his harvest (he did most of the collecting, actually. He is quite a mushroom enthusiast.)

Wild mushrooms

The rain has had all the mushrooms peeking out. Around our oak trees we've found many good edible mushrooms. This is only one of many harvests. Here are some Lactarius, various russela mushrooms and a bolete. We weren't sure about the russelas and the bolete, although it did not have orange pores and it didn't stain blue, so we took them to James Kimborough, a renoun mushroom expert who also happens to live just a couple streets away. They are indeed edible. The Lactarius are particularly good, I think. Almost addictive, really. Store-bought mushrooms (even the fancy ones) can't compare in my opinion. Ahhh....how nice it is to live in a place where people are generally frightened of mushrooms. The human competition is virtually non-existent.

We will be gently cooking these in butter for dinner.

Making Butter

I am certainly quite a beginner at making butter. The more I read about it the more little things I find that make a big difference. But I thought I would share what we have been up to these past months at least. Since Isla was weaned the milk has been amazingly creamy and wonderful, and we've been getting about 2 gallons a day. Dr. Weston Price found that the butter made in June had the most fat soluble activators, so this is likely the best time of year for butter-making. When the fridge starts to get full of milk I skim the cream from several gallons (2 gallons gives 1 quart of cream usually). Then we let the extra milk clabber and we mix it in with the oats for the chickens. It takes overnight for the cream to settle at the top of the jar.

After skimming I add a culture.

I had been using the clabber culture I had, but found it gave a very cheesy flavor, so the last batch of butter I just let ripen for several hours on the counter and I found the taste much better. I have been wondering if the flora danica culture would be nice for cultured butter as it is supposed to impart a buttery flavor to things.

When the cream has ripened, it is time for churning. I had been churning it in the food processor as the recipe in Nourishing Traditions calls for, but I think it is too fast as the butter would get a very hard, greasy texture. The last batch I made with egg beaters and the texture was much better. Surprisingly, cultured cream churns much faster at room temperature than cold, uncultured cream. The first batch I’d made I had chilled the cultured cream thinking it wouldn’t churn if it was warm and it took forever. The next batch took me by surprise by churning in under a minute. When I looked it up in my book Cheese and Cheese-making, Butter and Milk by James Long and John Benson (it was originally published in 1896!) it says, “If cream is churned while it is still sweet it is frequently longer before it is converted into butter, it produces less butter, and the flavor is less full and nutty.”

When the cream separates I strained the butter through a sieve, saving the buttermilk. I’ve found this buttermilk makes the best soaked oat porridge. In the cheese and butter book they say to add cold water before straining to help wash out the buttermilk. I'll have to try that.

When the cream separates I strained the butter through a sieve, saving the buttermilk. I’ve found this buttermilk makes the best soaked oat porridge..

And now the butter must be washed. The more buttermilk that stays behind in the butter the less the keeping qualities for the butter. This is when it would be salted, too, but have been making unsalted butter so far.

After the butter is made into a nice ball and as much of the water pressed out as possible, I either mould it in a cheese mould or roll it into balls, which I wrap in parchment paper and store in the freezer.

Tomatoes

I know these are not the loveliest tomatoes--they have quite a bit of cat-facing. Some of them split, because it decided to rain like crazy right as they were getting ripe. But they are our tomatoes and they taste quite good.