Jaune Flammee: Catching Up

These were the two strongest surviving Jaune Flammee seedlings two weeks ago. The one shown in the photograph below eventually proved to be the strongest of the the original trio, and so the one at left was removed this week to leave room for the other plant.

I hate to rogue out seedlings, but this year I promised myself I would try Steve Solomon's New Zealand drought-proofing method. Solomon is truly a self-sufficient gardener who recommends spacing plants out widely to combat drought and supplemental water use, and the author of Gardening When It Counts.His methods are exactly the opposite of current po pular container gardening / French intensive / raised bed gardening methods, but his works are very convincing. 

As a result of reading Gardening When It Counts, I decided to try spacing tomatoes and other heavy feeders  at least four to six feet apart in combination with a) the Shaker "dust-mulch" method, which involves hoeing lightly every day, b) light straw mulch, or c) an infrequently-mown ground cover like Dutch white clover.

Since we have a lot of trouble finding a tiller in the spring I decided to use a light straw mulch combined with periodical hoeing and cultivating. I like the idea of green mulches but it's very likely that they would get away from me entirely and I'd end up having to till in the end anyway, which I'd like to avoid for several reasons.

Jaune Flammee is an indestructible variety - I ended up with several survivors of the composting bucket, and so there is another one up front in the kitchen garden bed as well as this one. I use this plant almost every year as a transplant seedling in the workshops, and I have several converts to it in spite of its color and size (it's a glowing Orange Crush-orangey yellow, and it's a little smaller than a Rutgers). Most Kentuckians want a RED tomato, and they want a BIG tomato, so when I tell them that Flammee is an orange salad tomato they make a face and shake their heads.

Some Kentuckians do want a yellow tomato because it's a "low-acid" tomato, and I've stopped trying to tell people that there's no such thing as a low-acid tomato.

High sugar and bland, yes; truly low-acid, no. The fruit simply tends to be acidic and that's all there is to it, hovering right around a 4. The Brix, or sugar content, is another story. Brix may range from 3.5 to 8, according to test results on various individual and university websites. The sugars buffer the acids, while the solids may also play a part in the perception of fruit acidity. The link below offers a few results of testing:

http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/tomatoes.htm

Anyway, to get back to Jaune Flammee, people who want a "low-acid", or bland, tomato will not want  this variety because it has a stunning balance of sugars to acids and a complex array of flavors that need nothing for taste enhancement.