Let’s talk about a fantastic cool climate friendly crop that we sort of “forgot about,” at least until this season. We’re going to dive into tomatillo!
We learned just how cold climate friendly this crop was back in our former days of growing in Montana. It was a staple of our outdoor zone 4b gardens. When we moved to Alaska, we hit immediate struggles with outdoor grown tomatoes, so we sort of had to take a step back with many of our nightshades to do more study. Tomatillos sort of got “lost” in that transition!
We were playing around with ground cherries several years ago, which are very closely related to the tomatillo. They also produce paper like protective shells over the fruit, sometimes called a husk tomato. But, we were testing them in our early days of far northern growing as our logic at that time was “smaller fruit = better for colder climate.” (Which turned out to be semi-flawed logic.)
Well, we’re revisiting the tomatillo again and they are working out just as well as we remembered in our “warmer gardening” days. The bees are very happy with our choice, as well! We’d estimate that maybe there’s something about the husk that allows the fruit to have less trouble maturing than non-husked tomatoes. Sort of like a mini, natural greenhouse.
We found an extra early variety of tomatillo that was bred in Poland and is reported to specifically thrive in cooler summer conditions. The variety is called Amarylla and based on the flower production alone, we’d completely agree that this variety handles cooler temperatures quite well! It is incredibly prolific!
Our game plan here is to up our salsa game this year, as tomatillos go right at home with that. If you’ve been with us before, we’re always making salsa fresca once the bulk of our tomatoes start rolling in. This also helps us use up our previous season’s onion crop, which is starting to show signs they need to be gone.
We’re excited to have this crop back into our rotation and looking forward to seeing how it performs over the coming weeks and months. Beyond salsas, tomatillo can be used in jams and jellies, as a topper for salads and even diced up into a compote and put on buttered toast. We may even throw down some salsa verde, if our harvest quantities will support it!
