Heirloom tomatoes are just that, family heirlooms – grown from seeds saved over generations by families that grew or liked a particular tomato. Tomatoes can have up to thirty-one flavor components and, like wine, are described by growers with phrases like “intensely rich with sweet overtones” and “smoky and complex.” The whole principle is to have a seed bank of healthy, tried-and-true varieties of anything, including flowers and veggies of all sorts. Opalka was brought from Poland to New York around 1900.
Opalka has a thinner, more tender skin, a deeper red color both inside and out, is sweeter tasting, more flavorful overall, has denser flesh, fewer seeds, far less gel and open space inside, has a more sturdy growth habit and better leaf coverage. This is an excellent variety for making sauce or eating fresh. It is commonly styled as a paste tomato. Paste tomatoes are varieties that are specially adapted for cooking, particularly tomato sauces.
The Opalka is a long, red paste tomato that could easily be mistaken for a red jalapeno were it not for its sweet, floral aroma. The 5″ long, 3″ wide fruits have a pointy tip and grow in clusters. They are meaty with few seeds. Paste tomatoes are, of course, well suited for slow, long cooking, and the Opalka is a paste tomato first and foremost. But what sets this cultivar apart from other pastes, is its delicious, complex raw flavor, best ordered midseason.
Grows 6-8 ft. (1.8-2.4 m) tall. Needs a full sun. Takes around 70-80 days to reach maturity. For collecting the seed, allow the fruit to ripen, clean and dry the seeds, and ferment the seeds before storing to get rid of any bacteria. Seeds can be stored in airtight jars in a cool place for 5-7 years.
If you garden on a terrace, grow your tomatoes in a pot with a capacity of at least 10 to 15 gallons, and fertilize every few weeks with seaweed solution. You may have to water twice a day, so put those babies on a drip system with a timer if you work long hours.

Imagine beautiful multi-colored butterflies flitting in your garden; kids would want to spend time over there, and friends would drop in more often to see the garden that seems to attract such beautiful creatures. Everybody would love to have more butterflies in their garden, but it is hardly the easiest thing to do. You can’t just catch butterflies and release them in your gardens. In addition, just having flowers in your garden can’t help you many times - it’s just not necessary that this will ensure that you have lots of butterflies. So how do you do it ?
Well, here’s a site that should help you. Take a look at the Butterfly Farm Web Site (link)
Some extracts from the website:
- The good news is that it is very easy to attract butterflies to your own backyard, no matter how small or urban, and you can help to preserve these most brilliant and fascinating creatures.
- Raising butterflies: All about the caterpillars that will eventually become butterflies
- There are four stages to a butterfly’s life, and each stage is radically different from the others.
Briefly, a butterfly starts as an egg. After about 5 to 10 days the egg hatches and a tiny caterpillar (larvae) emerges.
The caterpillar starts to eat and will shed it’s skin 4 to 6 times as it gets bigger and bigger.
After about 2 to 4 weeks the caterpillar will be full grown and transforms itself into a chrysalis/pupa.
What happens next is most amazing as inside the pupal case the caterpillars body breaks down into a kind of soup from which grows the adult structure of the butterfly! This stage can take between 10 to 15 days. Finally, the adult butterfly emerges from the chrysalis.

Do you wonder what book would best serve your needs on a particular topic? Are you looking for a gift idea? Do you need a book for those rainy afternoons when you can’t play in the garden? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, look through the many gardening, horticulture, botany, and nature study books reviewed at this site. I’m sure you’ll find something to meet your need.
Books reviewed belong to the following categories:
- Alpine and Rock Gardens
- Water Gardens & Wetland Plants
- Specific Plants, Trees, and Shrubs
- Orchids & Other Houseplants
- Wildflowers
- General Plants, Trees, and Shrubs
- Lawns
- General Gardening Information
- Michigan Books
- Wildlife
All the reviews available at this location.

Fertilizer is the life-blood of a kitchen garden; give the right fertilizer and see the plants and shrubs perk up and show a nice growth. One easy way to get good fertilizer is by converting household organic waste into compost (organic waste that has been converted into useful fertilizer by bacteria present in the soil). So what is organic waste ? It is a number of things - eggshells, leaves, hedge trimmings, cut grass, vegetable and fruit trimmings, weeds. It includes stuff that you might not have though of such as sawdust, shredded branches, nutshells. etc. Organic material does not include paper, plastic, whole wood pieces, metal, rubber, bones, discarded meat, etc.
You can actually make compost in your own backyard, although it takes some time to get created. But why should you make compost ? Well, compost means that you are benefiting plants by adding air and naturally occuring organic compounts into the soil. This results in a gradual release of nutrients to plants, increases water retention and improves soil retention. And of course, you are getting rid of your organic waste in a good manner instead of sending to a landfill.
You can make compost yourself by 2 different methods, they depend on the way (called cold method or hot method), the the ease of doing it and the amount of time it takes.
The first method is called the cold method and could take upto an year, but this will be mostly an untended formation with minimal ongoing effort. What do you do ? You need some kind of bins or big containers to handle the stuff. In the first one, put all the dry stuff such as the cut grass, leaves, shredded branches, etc. This bin is more of an additive bin, and is not the bin in which compost gets made. That is made in the other 2 bins. Now, in the second bin, on a regular basis, put all the eggshells, kitchen waste including fruit and vegetable waste, coffee and tea grounds, and then cover with leaves from the first bin. Next time you have kitchen waste, put it in the second bin over the previous one, and again cover with leaves and all from the first bin. Do this every time you have the kitchen waste, and you will eventually end up with a bin containing layers of kitchen waste covered with leaves. This will take around 10-12 months, by which time you will have the bin filled up. Once the second bin is filled up with these layers, repeat in the third bin. The second bin in the meantime will eventually form compost, and then after 10-12 months, the third bin. You can repeat this process a number of times.
The second method is called the hot method and takes much less time, and is good to use when you need to make compost much earlier. You need the organic material and manure. Add the organic material and manure in a layered pattern, watering each layer slightly. After a couple of days, you will find that this layered composition starts to give off steam. After between 2-3 weeks, invert the pile layer by layer so that air gets into this decomposing mass properly. Do it again after 2-3 weeks, and then after another month of so, the pile would have formed into a dark mass that is very crumbly.

If you are like me and find it hard to sometimes make out clearly what plant names exactly are, then this site is recommended for you. What can happen sometime is that you are told about a plant that seems appropriate for your location, weather, but as a lot of names are in Latin (and for some reason, a lot of people talking about plants maybe feel more scientific by using the proper name instead of the common name), when you try to repeat the name to your local nursery or even search for it on a website, there are chances that you will not be able to find an exact match. And woe betide you if you by mistake find another plant; that means a loss of time and money.
So, try out this site where you click on a name and hear the actual pronunciation. This can be very useful information.