Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Tomato Bounty!


I have honestly been SO busy keeping up with my tomato harvest and the demands of the garden that I have had no time to write!
My tomato plants are the most amazing ever. I have about 50 plants and an unknown number of varieties. I planted a mixture of Heirloom Tomato Seed from Gurney's this year, so a real variety of red tomatoes, cherry and mini tomatoes as well as yellow, orange and purple tomatoes!
The plants have been really prolific but are starting to wind down. One day in August I had a 40 pound harvest day! It has been amazing.
Canning has taken up a bunch of time and I have a cabinet full of canned tomato sauce to use through the winter.
My sweetie gave me a super dehydrator for my birthday in August.. so I am also drying cherry tomatoes and sheets of tomato paste! In the past I have cooked some tomatoes down for paste and frozen them in ice cube trays then transferred them to freezer bags. The cubes were then added to sauce as a thickener or soups for extra flavor. I never would have thought of drying the paste... but the dehydrator instructions suggested it and I really like the idea! The amount of room it takes up is dramatically diminished. And I am not storing water... the paste should work really well as a thickener!
I imagine that I will spend the winter catching up with posts!

5 comments:

Shibaguyz said...

Congratulations on your monstrous tomato harvest. We doubled our tomato plants to 22 this year but I doubt if we'll have much room form more than that next year. We aspire to the day we can have a forty pound harvest from our own tomatoes.

Freedom Gardeners Rule!!

Beth said...

Thanks... I just did the math..
So far I have harvested approx. 134 pounds of tomatoes!

Have you joined Freedom Gardeners yet?

freedomgardeners.org

Awesome bunch of like-minded folks!
Beth

Bosch Images said...

Yum! What time is dinner??
I'll trade ya for some canned organic white peaches!

Beth said...

Peaches.. I LOVE peaches!
Nice to hear from you.
Tell me...Are you going to LEAF?
Dinner could be arranged...

Beth

Seth D said...

Awesome blog you have here