GardenHacker:
not your typical seedy site...

Weekend Update for 2007-09-02

Just a nice picture of some of the tomatoes we've harvested so far. The rest have been either eaten or frozen for making sauce this winter, thanks to a great time/moneysaving recipe from Mother Earth News. The recipe is, basically: wash core the tomatoes you're going to make into a sauce, toss them in the freezer and forget about them 'til the winter, when you'd like to have something to make to warm the kitchen. At that point you drop the frozen tomatoes into some boiling water for a couple of minutes, peel the skin off, put the peeled tomatoes into a pan and heat to boiling. Strain in a collander to remove the pulp from the juice, freeze again or continue to make a sauce. Another recipe in Mother from Dec/Jan 2007 gives a nice recipe for a garden marinara sauce.

So far they're all delicious, though the beefsteak from the garden seemed somewhat bland by comparison. Could have been a fluke.

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   One of the Black Prince tomatoes, I think - which has a pointy nose. There are a couple of these that have shown up. They keep getting bigger, but no change in color yet. I should start seeing the beefsteak ripening soon on the Japanese Tomato Rings, then these won't be far behind. Hoping they ripen before the frost!

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 My girls next to the 19" Japanese Tomato Ring. The "rogue" squash continue to produce, and the tomatoes continue to ripen, so all will remain for now. The girls enjoy picking the tomatoes, but they tend to leave the squash alone, since there are little "prickers" on them. Sensitive hands at this age.

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   Left: Around my fenced in garden, I have very long and flexible grass growing - possibly fescue, but I don't know. As I'm not one who is too particular about edging, this grass gets long enough to use as tomato ties. They go into the compost when the season's done, and when it's time to tie again, the grass is usually long enough. This is a convenient hack that's worked for me for several years. Right: The 29" JTR is thick with tomatoes - so much so that I can't see the "muffins" unless I'm looking down inside to water it.

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 Left: The Upside Down Tomato planter continues to bear and ripen little fruits. I'm looking into hanging basket alternatives that would do the same thing and have a water resevoir, too. Right: a better example of how Matt's Wild Cherry Tomato plants will grow to their root size.

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Tally as of Sept. 2, 2007:
19" JTR: 8.56lbs, Δ 1.81
29" JTR:6.91lbs, Δ 2.35
Garden: 4.28lbs, Δ 2.44
Container:1.62, Δ 0.34*

*Last calculation was skewed by an EBKOC (Error Before Keyboard Of Computer) - hadn't divided the total ounces by 16 for the calculation of the containers. DOH!