My first garden plot!!!

[Moth1992]

Just ate my first tomatoes from my plot!

The two Jeune Flammes. Pretty good! Refreshing, fruity and sweet! Im more of a pink/purple tomato myself but these were really enjoyable.

Now give me more you plants!

[Moth1992]

Today I was impatient ( or more like terrified about letting it overripe since I only go to the plot couple of times per week) so I harvested my first cucumber ever. I have no clue how big its suposed to get but it was super tasty, sweet and meaty so even if small in size I call it a success.



I noticed what looked like some tunneling under my plot but no exit or entry holes or plant damage. I start watering my cucumbers and the soil moves. I get my shovel but i cant find anything. So i continue watering and behold, a long snout comes out and a mole dashes across and starts diggining towards safety underneath my tomatoes.

I dont think so sir.

Intruder captured!


Intruder evicted!

[zeuspaul]

Congratulations

[GoDawgs]

@Moth1992 for your Fat Frog you will have to do the "Don't Squeeze the Charmin" trick. For greenies you do it by feel. You may also notice a slight yellowing of the fruit especially at the bottom.

This is a photo of Fat Frogs from May. I tried some when they were more green than this but I liked these better. These were used for MMMM seed saving.

[GoDawgs]

All that work gopher-proofing your plot is paying off. Well done!

[Moth1992]

Harvested some huge garlics today from the MMMM.

Im miffed about the tomatoes so far. Its still the start of the season but karma purple so far is bitter and jeune flamme, with the exception of the first one, is bland. Whipper snapper is just meh.

Hope that they improve as september arrives.

[Moth1992]

I pulled out whiper snapper to give The Beast more sun and space. Maglia rosa is loaded and giving me delicious pink maters im loving. The one in my balcony on the other hand is doing awfully, go figure.

Karma purple has improved drastically. Its now a fairly good tomato if i let it ripen well.

Kimberley has a bit of a tough skin but its a good tomato. And doing great in my shitty climate. Productive and tasty for an early fog friendly tomato.

Still working on watering Jaunne Flamme very little see if she gets some flavor.

I got my first black beauty today! see how it tastes...

Im the only one in my garden that has had several weeks of tomato harvesting. My two plot neighbours growing toms still havent had any break blush. I wonder what varieties they have.

The cucs look a bit mangey and sickly...but they are still producing so we will see.

The strawberries stoped producing. Not sure if its the temperatures are too warm.

Ive seeded brocolini and corn salad see if i can have a fall harvest. Will seed radishes and letuce also next week.

My hotest months are september and october so no idea how fall gardening works in this part of the world.

[MissS]

I'm glad to hear that you are getting some bragging rights with your tomato harvest your first year! It should make you feel pretty good.

[Moth1992]

Oh wow black beauty is a good tomato!! Hope it gives me more before the blight takes it.

[AKgardener]

Congrats on your mater success!! I hope you have many more years of success

[Moth1992]

Im drowning in maglia rosa. I need to learn how to cook and preserve tomatoes! Half of my kitchen table has been overtaken by tomatoes.

Now trying to figure out planting fall stuff while I still have summer stuff in. My OCD does not like my own messiness.

[bower]

Easy way to make sauce: chop your tomatoes up and toss with a little garlic, salt, pepper and herbs and olive oil. Then spread em in a roasting pan and put them in the oven for half an hour at 400F. Turn off the oven and let them sit inside overnight or a bit longer, which allows them to cool and dry out some (depends on how meaty they are). Skins can be tough so the easiest thing to do is run the sauce through a blender to desired consistency. Then freeze in right size containers.
If it's too hot to be cooking, whole tomatoes in a ziplock will keep better than sliced. Huck into deep freeze for later uses.

Freezer keeping is great if you have freezer space, and saves all the time, equipment, and space necessary for canning.
Edited to add, if you only have a little freezer space, sauce is much smaller and the way to go.

[Moth1992]

Easy way to make sauce: chop your tomatoes up and toss with a little garlic, salt, pepper and herbs. Then spread em in a roasting pan and put them in the oven for half an hour at 400F. Turn off the oven and let them sit inside overnight or a bit longer, which allows them to cool and dry out some (depends on how meaty they are). Skins can be tough so the easiest thing to do is run the sauce through a blender to desired consistency. Then freeze in right size containers.
If it's too hot to be cooking, whole tomatoes in a ziplock will keep better than sliced. Huck into deep freeze for later uses.

Freezer keeping is great if you have freezer space, and saves all the time, equipment, and space necessary for canning.
Edited to add, if you only have a little freezer space, sauce is much smaller and the way to go.

You just chuck it in the blender you dont use one of those strainer thingys?

[MissS]

@Moth1992 I don't. The whole thing goes into the blender.

In the hot summer heat I don't like to turn on my stove or my oven to reduce the tomatoes. I just put the fresh uncooked tomatoes into the blender, grind them and then pour them into the ziplocks to freeze. This way I can thaw them as I need them and can use them for salsa, chili or sauce. I really don't mind reducing them a little in the cold winter and then it helps to heat the house when I need it most.

[bower]

@Moth1992 I don't have the machine that removes skins, cores and seeds, which people use for processing large amounts of tomatoes for canning or sauce. This is the thing to have for big crops, especially where the skins are scarred and nasty or there are big cores etc. Which at my scale of processing, I just cut off by hand as required.
I think that skins and seeds can add some bitter flavors which would be noticeable in a pure tomato product such as paste or canned. I have made roasted sauce with the tomato parts left after removing all seeds, and didn't notice a big difference. It's also possible to pull the skins after roasting, again I didn't find a big difference in flavor for the trouble and waste. But I am using lots of garlic oil and herbs, so a complex flavor is expected. One case where it is worth pulling the skins, if you have different colors of tomatoes and want a lumpy product with bits of different fruit that stand out from one another, I would then pull skins and skip the blender step.
Also when it comes to seed flavors, YMMV depending on the type of tomato and the amount of seeds and gel. Big meaty fruit are not likely to be overwhelmed by a few seeds, vs cherries. I did experiment with stovetop sauces too, and I recall at least one case where the seedy flavor was noticeable, but may have been smaller and seedier fruit. Roasting in oil tends to bring out the sweetness in tomatoes so that may help, but also serves my lack of patience standing over a pot on the stove. Oops I forgot to mention EVOO in the recipe! For a roasted sauce with very seedy fruit, pulling skins and skipping the blender would also minimize the flavor effect of many seeds.

[Seven Bends]

I haven't tried the blender method, mainly because tomato seeds generally taste bitter to me and I worry that I would taste them in the sauce. Also, my blender is from the Stone Age and I'm not sure what the results would be or how long it would take to do the job.

Last night I looked around my dining room, living room and kitchen and realized I needed to do something about the tomato invasion.

1-IMG_9535.JPG

I'm a big fan of the fruit strainer attachment for KitchenAid mixers. This is my favorite method to deal with large volumes of excess tomatoes:

Wash or rinse tomatoes. Cut out cores and any bad spots. Cut tomatoes into a few large chunks, just enough to be sure there's no internal rot, and dump them into a giant soup pot. (For something like Maglia Rosa, I'd probably just cut them in half and wouldn't bother removing the core/stem end.) Cook them at a simmer for half an hour or so, pretty much just as long as it takes to cut up the rest of the tomatoes. Run the simmered tomatoes through the KitchenAid fruit strainer. The juice/puree goes into another soup pot and gets cooked down to about half volume, which is the longest part of the process (an hour to 90 minutes at a low boil). Last night it took less than 10 minutes to strain the contents of an 8-qt soup pot. Obviously the whole process takes a lot longer than that, but the straining part is a snap.

For excess cherry tomatoes, I roast them whole in the oven in shallow Pyrex baking dishes with olive oil, garlic and oregano, then run them through a manual food mill. I find it's not worth the effort to assemble, disassemble and clean the KitchenAid fruit strainer for small quantities. The manual food mill is much slower, though.

When I freeze cut-up tomatoes, I remove the skins and seeds, so it tends to be a long, tedious process. I've done about ten quart-size ziploc bags and two gallon-size this summer, all I can fit in my freezer.

[Moth1992]

Tomatoes were roasted last night, will spend some time with my small bullet blender tonight

Thanks all for the ideas.

[Tormahto]

I'd suggest sharing some of your bounty with your gardening neighbors who haven't tried gopher proofing their plots. Perhaps they'll get the hint.

[bower]

I have a really lame bullet type blender ATM, which does not grind almonds as shown on the package whatsoever, and barely makes a good dressing. Impulse buy after my old sturdy one finally failed, which I regret. I was glad to see it did a quick job of the tomato sauce though. Just a few flecks of skin to be seen, and it's probably as well not to blend too well, as thoroughly grinding the seeds may disperse that flavor throughout. So I tell myself.

[Moth1992]

I pulled my tomatoes few weeks ago and started an autumn/winter garden. But was weird because october was super hot and then november got cold

My snap peas produced like 5 peas if deliciousness and then stoped. I want more!!!

Letuce and arugula are doing ok mostly, some better than others. And the bok choi just started sprouting.

Im going to leave the peppers see if they survive or not.