My First Tomato Preservation

So our Roma tomatoes have finally started ripening like mad, so I have been trying to figure out how to use all the tomatoes I have been picking. A few days ago I canned the whole tomatoes you see in the top picture, which consist of about half Roma and half Juliet tomatoes, with a few Early Girl and Better Boy thrown in.

On Friday, I picked about 13 pounds of tomatoes, mostly Roma. Not everything is completely ripe when I pick it--some go in a paper sack and wait a few days before I can use them--so the bowl shows all of them I had ready to be used on Friday. After spending hours laboring over them, I ended up with four measly pints of spaghetti sauce and two pints of tomato juice. It really makes you appreciate just how cheap our food is...I don't even want to imagine what the cost per jar for this spaghetti sauce would be once you factor in all my garden expenses and labor.

Anyway, there is something fulfilling about making things myself, even if I can only justify the expense by calling it a hobby.

Tomato Salad

So today I picked the largest tomato in my garden, a 25 ounce Brandywine. It is really quite large--that is my hand in the photo! It's probably not quite ripe yet, but I honestly am not sure how to tell, I have never actually seen a Brandywine before!

All the information I have seen says that Brandywines get to be about 14 ounce, so I am quite pleased with my monster! Hopefully it tastes great, because from two plants I only had 4 fruits set!

The bottom picture shows the array of tomatoes from my garden this year. From largest to smallest they are Brandywine, Better Boy (Probably the closes to a normal "supermarket" sized tomato), Early Girl, Roma, Juliet, and Sweet 100 cherry.

I tend to pick them a bit early and ripen them inside. This seems to help avoid problems with birds, bugs, rain, and sun, and supposedly they will still taste the same.