Thistle Ha’

The Mighty 'Mato, background, shows more vigorous growth than the regular Brandywine variety, in front. (Click to embiggen.)

A new breed of tomato, the Mighty ‘Mato, is on trial in Thistle Ha’s garden this year. What’s unique about this tomato is that it’s a grafted plant, combining vigorous root stock with a Brandywine scion, a heritage variety famous for its quality and flavour. Grafting techniques have been used for fruit trees for a long time. Recent grafting experiments by greenhouse growers produced two to three times the number of tomatoes compared to the non-grafted variety. The Mighty ‘Mato is the first grafted tomato available for home gardens. Its root stock has been selected to be more tolerant to diseases and over/under watering, and to produce substantially more fruit over a longer season. A desirable tomato for home gardeners with summer vacation absences, limited growing space, or an aversion to using pesticides.

We are growing four regular Brandywine tomato plants beside the Mighty ‘Mato to check the marketing claim that this is a “super tomato”. Not all home gardeners know that tomatoes are stem rooters; planting the stem all the way up to the bottom leaves results in additional root formation and more vigorous growth. The graft on the Mighty ‘Mato is marked with a band, but instructions do not emphasize the importance of ensuring that the graft remains above the soil surface during planting. Otherwise the scion will form its own roots, eliminating the benefits of grafting, and resulting in an ordinary tomato at an extraordinary price – $15 a plant.

From mid-April until mid-December, 2011, the farmhouse was renovated. As the work progressed, daily progress reports and photos were posted to show the details of how our contractor started with, for example, this:

Before: old dining room (click on all photos to embiggen).

and ended with this:

After: Charlotte's new kitchen.

For those interested in reading about troubles and triumphs of this project from start to finish, all posts concerning it have been consolidated into an article entitled “2011 House Renovation”, located in the Pages section on the right-hand side.

The Thistle Ha’ corn harvest is done. Despite a late planting due to a very wet spring, the corn yield was quite good.

I accompanied a 20-tonne load of corn to the local mill, and talked to the general manager. He surprised me when he said that they sell most of their corn as ethanol feedstock. Although Canada started promoting use of biomass (corn, wood products) to manufacture ethanol fuel in 2000 to combat global warming, he said the shift of corn sales from food to fuel has occurred just recently, after the U.S. government started subsidizing corn as a biofuel. This resulted in construction of numerous ethanol plants using corn as feedstock.

40% of the 2010 corn crop in the U. S. was converted to ethanol. This is past the “tipping point”; the U. S. corn crop is now insufficient to meet food needs. The wet spring in the U. S. mid-west and drought conditions in southern hemisphere corn growing regions has resulted in reduction of world-wide corn production in 2011, pushing corn to its highest price in recent memory. This has led to increased prices for other food crops such as soybeans and cereal grains. Although this trend has been beneficial to grain farmers and big agribusiness, increased feed prices have hit the poultry and hog industries hard. Cattle farmers are less affected since the corn mash byproduct from ethanol production is sold for cattle feed. More worrisome, some economists claim that the price of corn has started to track the price of crude oil. Has the U. S. policy to increase corn ethanol production in an effort to reduce the cost of imported crude oil to the American economy not only failed to reduce the cost of energy, but actually caused a permanent increase in global food prices?