Swimming in Tomatoes

My tomatoes started to ripen last week, and now I am being over run with tomatoes. I am picking 4-6 tomatoes per day, plus the cherry tomatoes are starting to ripen as well. To make matters worse, my neighbor is going on vacation, and she brought over a bowl of her tomatoes, and instructed my wife to pick tomatoes from her garden so they will not go bad. I LOVE having too many tomatoes. Not only do we eat them with every meal, but this morning I canned my first quart of tomatoes. Now I will have garden tomatoes next winter. I like to can veggies one jar at a time, so I do not have to spend all day on this project. I have a small, tall pot that fits one quart sized jar, and it is pretty easy. I will likely pickle peppers and cucumbers this summer as well.



Back to tomatoes.... This spring I planted half heirloom tomatoes and half hybrid. The hybrids (Big Boy & Better Boy), are quick growers, and they are the ones that are giving me fruit now. The heirlooms (yellow pear cherry tomatoes, Black of Tulia, Purple Calabash, & Stripped Roma) grow more slowly, and will ripen a little later. Planting several different varieties of tomatoes with different growing lengths will give a longer season with ripening tomatoes.



In seasons past, I have always tried to nurse my tomato plants through the heat of August and tried to encourage a second crop of tomatoes in the fall when it cools down. Sometimes this works, sometimes it does not. This year I am going to try something that I recently read. I am going to cut off branches off of some of my plants, and root them inside in a vase of water. When the roots develop, I will plant these in the ground, and dig up the old plants. I read that this is a better method to get that second crop of fall tomatoes. I'll let you know how it goes.

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