The Tomatoing Begins
Rounds one and two of the tomato harvest are going to get sauced and stored for winter
Twenty-plus pounds of tomatoes washed and ready to be turned into sauce
The cool May and June slowed the tomatoes a bit, but they sprung back like champs in mid-July.
This batch is the second round of 20-plus pounds harvested over the weekend and processed into tomato sauce for fall and winter.
They’re a combination of Chef’s Choice, Heinz Processor, Classic Roma and a San Marzano variety called Tiren, which blend well for a nice, rich tomato flavor in sauces.
As part of our staple tomatoes, we grow these year in and out, but next year we may change up the sauce varieties.
Bowls of tomatoes (L-R): Chef’s Choice and Roma, Heinz Processor, Tiren and Roma
While we really like the Tiren for size, flavor and ability to stick through the heat pretty well, it seems to have more trouble with blossom end rot than similar varieties, so we lost a good portion of the fruit.
Right next to these we’ve got a bed of San Marzanos about one month behind and they have no issues at all.
Fortunately, we make use of even the stuff that’s not suitable for eating. Our ducks and chickens don’t care about the aesthetics of their tomatoes, so the bad ones go to them which they gobble them up and turn them into manure.
So even if those tomatoes don’t make into our food supply this time, they’ll go into helping the next batch come out big, healthy and tasty.
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[…] The past couple of weeks were considerably cooler than the previous month which has kicked the tomatoes in high gear. This is the harvest from this morning, which is all from seed I collected last year (cheap!). Looks like we’ll have two or three more of these hauls before the end of September. If production keeps up, we may beat our record of 120 pints of tomato sauce we jarred around this time last year. […]