a tomato year

Oh my goodness.
The tomatoes are rolling in nonstop.
We have had precisely 2 half days of rain in the last 2 months. With the lack of rain our tomato season has been really extended . It has also been in the 70's, also good for the tomatoes for sure. The rain is supposed to start in 10 days or so. It is my goal to get most of the harvesting done before then.

I have stopped watering altogether in hopes of getting them to ripen faster. It looks like, for the first time, I might actually put up enough tomato sauce for the year. This is a great savings to my family. To avoid BPA, I had been buying organic tomato puree in glass bottles that came from Italy. Ouch. $3.29 for 24oz. Ouch. And then there's the organic tomato soup in the cartons, expensive also.

I am going the easy route. I am roughly cutting up the whole tomatoes and tossing them into an 8 quart stock pot with onion, garlic, olive oil, and seasonings. I cook that down for several hours. After it cools, I use my stick blender to puree, and run the sauce through a mesh sieve to remove the seeds.

So easy.

I will freeze most of the sauce because I have space in my freezer, and can the rest.

I also have 4 big beautiful heirloom tomatoes (Old German), and more to come.
These beauties are destined for lacto-fermented salsa. Yum.

The rest of the garden is slowing down.
I found a ripe strawberry yesterday. Weird.
The raspberries are still going strong. The pole beans were a bust. Zucchini was so-so. Rhubarb excellent. Potatoes okay.

This is a tomato year.

Have a blessed day, Tami