Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Yeah this is an odd piece to pass on to the list. But it mentions two 
varieties I grow, Costoluto Genovese and Matt's Wild Cherry

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
------------------------------------------

The Tomato Prince
http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/the-tomato-prince
      By Nancy Harmon Jenkins

Louis-Albert De Broglie rules a tomato kingdom: He grows 514 varieties at his 
château-hotel in France. A few of the most worthy appear at an extraordinary 
dinner party in his greenhouse.

If you think Arkansas Traveler is simply a popular American folk tune and 
Glasnost a Soviet governing philosophy, if you think Matt's Wild Cherry must 
be a new Lifesaver flavor and Green Zebras belong in the exotica section at 
the zoo--think again.

They are four varieties of heirloom tomatoes out of more than 3,000 that are 
providing inspiration to cooks and gardeners all over the world, from Vermont 
to Siberia, from Arizona to the Crimean Peninsula, from Poland and Italy 
to--not incidentally, as I'll explain in a minute--France. Seed savers and 
collectors, working in attics, garden sheds and country markets like medieval 
monks in pursuit of saintly relics, are scrambling after the smallish, 
flattish, round and rather nondescript-looking seeds of old and forgotten 
varieties of Lycopersicon esculentum. At greenmarket stalls, heirlooms 
exhibit a profusion of colors, shapes and sizes: red, pink, yellow, green, 
orange, purple, ivory and almost black fruits, some as small as currants, 
some as large as squashes--striped ones, dappled ones, fruits shaped like 
plums, like persimmons, like peppers, some smooth and round, some ridged and 
crenulated.

Heirloom-tomato fever has even caught on with the French aristocracy. Prince 
Louis-Albert de Broglie--who bears a name almost as venerable as Bourbon or 
Charlemagne but refers to himself as le prince jardinier (the gardener 
prince)--recently installed an heirloom-tomato collection in the walled 
potager, or kitchen garden, of his Château de la Bourdaisière, a modest but 
charming sixteenth-century estate outside Tours that he and his brother 
Philippe-Maurice bought a few years back.

Dominating the village of Montlouis-sur-Loire, between the Loire and Cher 
rivers in the heart of the Montlouis wine district, the Renaissance Château 
de la Bourdaisière was once the residence of royal mistresses: Marie Gaudin, 
petite amie of François I, and Gabrielle d'Estrées, a favorite of Henri IV. 
Today it operates as a kind of bed-and-breakfast. (The inn charges extra, 
however, for the delicious and copious breakfast.) There are 18 rooms with 
private bath, as well as two suites.

With a friend, I stayed at the château last summer. We shared a suite of 
spacious, comfortable rooms with tall casement windows that gave on to the 
park--a scene of utter peace and tranquillity. Guests can wander freely over 
the château's extensive forested grounds or relax in a secluded corner of the 
drawing room, which has been furnished in a family style, complete with old 
portraits and wedding photos. La Bourdaisière makes a good base for exploring 
the surrounding array of medieval and Renaissance châteaus (including 
Villandry, with its 17 acres of vegetable, herb and flower gardens). One 
small caveat: Visitors to la Bourdaisière should be prepared for a rather 
stiff reception from the staff; because of a mix-up in reservations, we were 
asked quite abruptly to leave.

But you don't need to stay at the château to tour the potager. Under the 
experienced hand and eye of Marc Brizion, the garden, which is open to the 
public from April to mid-November, includes an astounding 514 varieties of 
tomato, as well as 120 different lettuces and some 40 varieties of basil. 
(Companion-planting basil with tomatoes is an old organic gardener's trick 
for warding off insects--marigolds have a similar effect.) The potager 
operates under the principles of what the French call culture biologique, 
meaning that the gardener uses only organic fertilizers and no sprays other 
than the copper sulfate (also known as Bordeaux mixture) acceptable to 
organic cultivators.

The genial prince is eager to show me le conservatoire de la tomate--the 
tomato garden. "This potager had been in disarray for 50 years before we 
bought the château," he told me as we strolled the grassy paths between plots 
where latticework trellises, artfully made out of rough wooden sticks bound 
with willow withes, keep the rangy tomato plants from sprawling. 
"Biodiversity is the idea," he continued. "That and the notion that a garden 
should be a pleasant and a useful place." He pointed with pride to his 
Italian Costoluto Genovese and American Green Zebra and treasured American 
Brandywine plants.

After touring the potager and chatting (in French) with Brizion, a traveler 
might wander to a converted stable nearby, where one of the château's young 
chefs demonstrates tomato recipes (quiches, sauces, salsas, soups) and offers 
samples of his creations as well as, frequently, wedges of the most recently 
harvested fruits. Visitors can also stop by the château's shop, which sells 
the prince's bottled sauces, salsas and whole, peeled tomatoes. (For those 
who can't make it out to the Loire Valley, the prince also sells these 
condiments at his Paris shop, called Le Prince Jardinier.) There's still more 
tasting to be done at the château in mid-September, at the annual fête de la 
tomate, when visiting chefs prepare heirloom-tomato dishes that celebrate the 
height of the harvest.

The head chef at the château, Stéphane Garnier, does the cooking when the 
prince entertains dinner guests in one of the handsome old greenhouses at the 
far end of the potager--parties that are most common in midsummer, when the 
long twilights give the space a subtle glow. Naturally enough, the menu often 
focuses on tomatoes: thinly sliced and baked, in a pissaladière that is a 
variation on the Provençal onion pizza; braised, in a tomato soup lightly 
spiced with cumin; pureed, in a vinaigrette for greens; roasted, in a gratin 
with cheese made from the milk of local goats. And the vanilla ice cream 
dessert gets a dollop of green-tomato marmalade. These recipes are so good 
that they can spread heirloom-tomato fever even to people who don't know the 
difference between Arkansas Traveler and Matt's Wild Cherry.