• Going to BlogHer 2008?
• Food photography through a new lens
• Race to the bottom
• Vote to promote healthy food
• The report from BlogHer ’08

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

• Green Thumb Sunday: A puff of purple
• Green Thumb Sunday: Western Azalea
• Green Thumb Sunday: Petal blossoms
• Green Thumb Sunday: Marin magnolia
• Green Thumb Sunday: Yellow as the sun

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

• Green Thumb Sunday: Dew on the collard green
• Green Thumb Sunday: They’re green…for now…
• Green Thumb Sunday: Soon…very soon…
• Green Thumb Sunday: Wishing well
• Green Thumb Sunday: Opening

On Wednesday night this year, our across-the-street neighbors, Elephant Bird Camp, hosted an all-night party that featured one live band after another until around 5:30 a.m., including one band that played the entire Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album start to finish. It was an impressive line-up, but I had decided I wanted to get up for sunrise, so at a certain point, I crawled into my tent, popped in my earplugs, and went to sleep.

When I woke up, the final band, i can dress myself, was playing the last song of their set. I still had my earplugs in, but thought I quite clearly heard this lyric:

“On the day the tomatoes came home!”

I took out the earplugs, certain there was no way I’d heard that correctly. But indeed, the singer repeated the lyric:

“On the day the tomatoes came home!”

I lay there as the band continued singing about an alien invasion of tomatoes. And stomping on said tomatoes. And turning the invaders into tomato paste. And ketchup. And putting said ketchup on their meat.

It wasn’t a rip-off of the B-movie classic, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but it certainly reminded me that it might be time to break out that film for a viewing…

It was just another morning in Black Rock City, people. And while i can dress myself is, indeed, a local band that performs regularly in San Francisco, it seemed absolutely appropriate that I would not have heard this particular tomato-related song until I was at Burning Man, waking up for the sunrise. The Playa’s serendipitous like that.

Enjoy the song for yourself below. And a shout-out to our Elephant Bird Camp neighbors – so glad we were all in the same neighborhood!

• The (OK-not-really) fashionable tomato plant
• Where things (don’t) stand with the community garden
• Tomatoes: Eat, don’t throw
• People will come (part II)
• First, best tomato

The end.

Translation: I have much to share with you, good readers of the Interwebz, but life has been moving at a breakneck pace, and today, I’m choosing to opt for a little work slowdown on the blog to add some breathing room.

I’m also heading out to the land of the giant, fire-breathing flowers once again, so this space shall remain quiet until my return. But when I’m back, there will be stories of gardens that tower overhead, and butter cows, and a status update on my containers, and all that. Since we’re actually just heading into Bay Area Summer, there are plenty more tomato updates to come in the beginning of what is Fall in the rest of the country.

Have a great rest of August and early September, and I shall return anon. I promise.

• Where things (don’t) stand with the community garden
• Where it’s at: August 19
• Your stories and pictures can help Midwestern farmers
• Staying indoors as criminal act
• Five local gardens to visit

Oh my friends, how they know me. Amy was, of course, totally right, and that is how we ended up at Harvest, a small, warm space on the square that features the state capitol, for a Sunday night dinner last weekend. This farm-to-table restaurant features seasonal, regional cuisine, and apparently the Executive Chef, Derek Rowe, is all about the challenge of keeping that rolling even through the harsh Wisconsin winters. I tip my hat—that’s more of a challenge than I was willing to manage for more than three of those Midwestern winters in a row.

It turned out we’d stumbled in on a night when the restaurant was hosting a fundraising dinner—they’ve been invited to host a dinner at the James Beard Foundation on April 6 in New York City, and proceeds from last Sunday night’s feast were slated to help get the staff to the East Coast for that event.

The $25 prix fixe menu featured a salad of field greens, radish, and sunchokes with a sherry-walnut vinaigrette or a curried parsnip soup with parsnip chips; a mushroom ragu with creamy polenta and spicy spinach, a pot roast of Wisconsin grass-fed beef brisket, or an incredibly light fish and chips served with a crisp winter coleslaw of cabbage rutabaga and turnip. Dessert options included a vanilla bean panna cotta with grapefruit supremes, a date walnut cake with mascarpone ice cream, or a house-made licorice gelato with an almond biscotti.

The locavore attitude extended even to the cocktail menu, which included my choice: The Door County Cherry Drop, made from Death’s Door Vodka (made with wheat from Washington Island, Wis.), Door County Montmorency Cherry Juice and fresh lemon juice.

Harvest will host two more James Beard Foundation fundraiser dinners: one tonight from 5 p.m. until closing, and another on March 21, also from 5 p.m. until closing. If you’re in Madison or passing through, I encourage you to check it this warm, welcoming space that supports local and regional farms and producers.

• A visit to The French Laundry
• Thyme on my hands
• Tomato porn worth peeking at
• Locavorism in Staunton, Part II
• The juice that cures the cough

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

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Inside the cab of a snail-shaped vehicle called The Golden Mean, a little girl’s face sparkled with astonishment as she pulled a lever that caused fire to shoot out of the snail’s eyes. Across the lot, patrons tried their hand at Matisse Enzer’s Flamethrower Shooting Gallery.

And somewhere in between, I came upon a version of False Profit Labs’ Carbon Garden. Shoulder-height flowers, graceful and tough, curved up from the lot’s surface, spitting fire into the night air.

Can you imagine? A garden that doesn’t even require watering? Sounds like about the most perfect garden for a horticultural klutz like me.

The first night I was on the Playa at Burning Man, my friend Fatemeh and I ran across the same garden, still under construction, and this time, clearly laid out on a much bigger scale than the version I’d seen in Oakland.

It wasn’t firing yet, but later in the week, I found it again, blooming in the desert night air, with residents of Black Rock City wandering through it. Now there were not only the shoulder-height flowers, but ones that soared overhead, as well.

On my last day on the Playa, I rode out with a new friend to the garden. It took awhile to get there—the dust was kicking up and we had to stop over and over again to shield our eyes from the storm. But it was haunting, even in daytime, even when not spitting fire. In daylight, the flowers curved up from the lakebed, the carbon steel twisted and dusty. But despite of…and perhaps because of…all that had happened over the course of the week, the garden was more beautiful than ever.

• Where things (don’t) stand with the community garden
• Iowa City cowboy spaghetti
• Drill, baby, drill
• Dealing in wine barrels
• Year-round farmy goodness

I have a story to tell about those metal flowers, but before I get to that, I have to talk about some oddly appropriate tomatoes that a coworker gave me just before I left. She brought them to me in a brown paper bag, and that, people, is way better than everything else that usually comes in a brown paper wrapper. (I’m talking about textbooks. You know, after kids put their homemade book covers on them? Do they do that anymore? Regardless, get your mind out of the gutter.)

I ate some of the tomatoes before we left, but my friend Fatemeh and I packed some of them to take in the car and to eat on the desert our first couple of days there. As we drove toward Reno, we pondered the little tomatoes, which were a variety unfamiliar to my coworker.

They were small and round, like Early Girls only smaller, and with an almost nipple-like protrusion on the end, which, to be fair, was kind of appropriate for Burning Man. Not that I took my shirt off, mind you, but it is a temporary city filled with expressionistic souls.

We didn’t figure out what the tomatoes were, but we enjoyed them until they were, sadly, gone. And then it was a long few days before we returned to any place where fresh vegetables are a routine occurrence.

When I got back to the office yesterday, I discovered that, while I was gone, my coworker had learned what variety they were: “Jolly” Tomatoes, an award-winning variety in 2001, known for its distinctive point. Of course, some seed catalogs describe that as a “tear drop,” which is certainly less risqué than my dirty-minded evaluation.

Nonetheless, they’re sweet, they’re tasty, they’re thick-skinned but not in a bad or troublesome way, and apparently they’re good cooked or raw. I didn’t wait to find out how they heat up, but I can assure you that if you get your hands on this cheerily-named variety, they’re going to be a very tasty addition to your garden. And if you’d rather think of them as having a teardrop on the end, well, that’s totally cool with me.

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Over at The Huffington Post, Stacy Miller, the Executive Director of the Farmer’s Market Coalition, has some great data on farmer’s markets and their impact on healthy eating habits around the country. Did you know that Kaiser Permanente is integrating farmer’s markets into their wellness plans? I certainly didn’t, and that makes me feel a little more warm and fuzzy toward that particular giant of the healthcare industry.

There’s also a wee shoutout to the farmer’s market in Hanalei, HI, which I had the rough job of visiting last summer while on vacation with The Mint Killer and her family. We plundered it for amazing local fruits, herbs and vegetables that showed up on our lanai table just hours later. There’s really no better way to eat while traveling.

How will you celebrate National Farmer’s Market Week? What’s your favorite aspect of your local market? Share your thoughts in the comments, or over on Stacy’s post.

• To market, two markets
• Debunking my personal plumeria myth
• Oakland Community Farmer’s Market to reopen Saturday
• Not living up to her name this year
• Feta pesto