Fried Blue Tomatoes?

One of the pleasures of the winter "hot stove gardening season" here in upstate New York is gathering all of your gardening catalogs together to decide what we will be ordering.

This year (actually, back in December) the Territorial Seed Company catalog arrived in our mailbox.  Considering that we've been gardening since the 1970's, and have explored a lot of catalogs, we've never looked at Territorial's catalog before.

We've always loved the unusual - we grew purple potatoes and beans back in the 1970's, for example, when only a handful of seed catalogs offered them.  Not content with red watermelon, we quickly gravitated to yellow.  White carrots?  Sure.  Rainbow chard?  Of course.

But....blue tomatoes?

That's one of the varieties Territorial is offering.  Or, to be exact, Indigo Rose tomatoes.

This tomato is said to have an indigo "almost blue" skin with high amounts of anthocyanin, a naturally occurring pigment that is being investigated for various healthful qualities. 

Am I ready for a blue tomato?  I've had white tomatoes, green (ripe green, that is) tomatoes, striped tomatoes, fuzzy tomatoes (Garden Peach), and even brown tomatoes.

So, why should blue tomatoes give me just a little pause?

After all, I eat blueberries, and eggplant.  And, as my regular readers know, I even grew black petunias this summer.

For right now, these are going on our "maybe list". 

What else is on our list for the 2012 gardening season?  I'll write about that later this month.