Growing tomatillos can take a bit of local experience. In many places they are a Summer crop, but my Summer tomatillo crop was a flop. The bed grew beautifully and the plants were covered in fruit, and then the beetles moved in and stripped the lot to stems. But the fallen fruit re-seeded a Winter crop, which although sporadic around the garden is doing very well and not getting eaten at all.
When to grow?
Much of success with gardening here requires finding the right time to sow, and as I have found with many plants already, they self-sow themselves in the right season. No sooner had I finally given up on my Summer tomatillo bed, dug it over, fertilised, rested and re-sown it with cauliflowers, than tomatillo seedlings started to appear. I left them, which was fortunate because the cauliflowers didn’t do well (not cold enough I think), and now I’m getting a second crop in the bed.
My confusion came from the general planting advice, which is that tomatillos are a summer crop to plant in late spring. However, like tomatoes, they actually do well here through our mild Winter. An unlucky frost might knock them back though.
The fruit forms inside a little paper ‘lantern’, and it is ripe when it fills it to splitting. It can be a long wait from when you first see the lanterns, but once you finally have some to pick they tend to come in a steady stream, with a handful from each plant every few days. I was busy with guests and then was surprised at just how many were ready to pick when I got back to the garden. It’s more than I ever got from the summer crop, with plenty more coming.
Growing tomatillos
Also during my stocktake this week I discovered that the purple tomatillos I sowed a while back and had almost given up on waiting to germinate have in fact sprouted and are doing well. With the prospect of warm and dry weather from now on I will hope to get a crop off these too, before the beetles move in in Summer.
So it’s a nice surprise that the tomatillos I had given up on as a crop actually do really well; I just have to grow them through Winter. I will sow them direct in Autumn, which gives them the chance to germinate in their own time. They need standard full sun and rich moist soil conditions.
By the way, if you’re also new to growing tomatillos, they are a quite weak bush. They tend to fall over once there is any weight of fruit, and branches also split away from the main stem. Staking kind of works, but my new strategy is to plant them as a clump, as in the above photo, so that their branching stems can form an interlocked canopy to support each other.
Using tomatillos
As they are not readily available in the shops here, growing tomatillos gives us an interesting addition to the kitchen repertoire. Tomatillos have a sour flavour which responds well to cooking. My favourite use for them at the moment is a green salsa. Remove the paper and give them a quick wash to remove the greasy bloom on the fruit, then toss them in a heavy pan and cook them dry with shaking from time to time. The aim is to scorch the skins a little, as the smokey flavour works well. You can also char them on the barbecue like you would capsicum.
When the berries seem cooked through, cool and store in the fridge. You can then blend them with citrus juice, coriander leaves, onion, maybe avocado, to make a green sauce that goes with barbecued meat or mexican dishes.
Fortunately our local avocados are also ripening when my tomatillos start, so I can cook up a tomatillo salsa and have a Mexican – inspired dinner.
I have a couple of sowings in production now, so should be growing tomatillos and picking them through to the end of Spring, but I think I will leave sowing the next lot until Autumn, although if any self-sow again I will watch how they manage with those beetles in Summer.