Trim Tomatoes?

tomatoes 058 Do you trim tomatoes? Each year we plant about 3 rows of tomatoes on short fencing so that we can tie them up easily after trimming them. After a while, the rows get so overgrown that you can’t walk through the rows anymore. That is how I know it is time to get to work.

You can see how much greenery gets cut off from each row when you see all the greenery on the ground. I sit on a bucket and use a little paring knife to carefully cut off the unproductive branches and newest blooms. This late in the season there is not enough time for flowers to become tomatoes before Mr. Frost comes along. My master gardener friend, Linda, taught me how to do this years ago.

tomatoes 055 We don’t have a really long season up here in the inland pacific northwest so this is one of the tricks we gardeners need to do. Doing this, makes the plants get busy making fruit bigger and faster. Trimming also makes it a lot easier to tie the plants up and makes them visibly easier to harvest. It is a task that takes a lot but it really is worth the effort. I read an interesting article all about this here.

Tomatoes Brought In

tomatoes in kitchen — tomatoes kitchen guarded by gnome

Tomatoes brought in safe and out of the cold. We had to go ahead and harvest all the tomatoes as the temperatures dove down to freezing here in the northern part of the Inland Northwest. Here are the last of the veggies and tomatoes ripening in our kitchen.

tomato tabletop — tabletop covered with tomatoes

tomato tabel top — tomato tabletop in guest bedroom

The tomatoes are the bulk of what was left in the garden. At this point there are three 8′ long tables of them in the guest bedroom downstairs. So, if you were to rename that room it would have to be the tomato room now. I go through them daily and sort out the ripe to make tomato sauce to restock our pantry with.

Make Salsa

It is time to make salsa, culminating with canning a dozen quarts yesterday. Beginning with testing your chopping talents, the sharpness of your knives, and the quantity of patience you possess. Then, there are a few days of letting it sit and stirring, re-covering while the enticing aroma fills the house. This is all before the real work of canning begins. But, now we have more than enough salsa for next year sitting on the pantry shelf.

Canning Tomatoes

Canning

tomato canning fooling around We are canning tomatoes. I was fortunate to have a 12-year-old fabulous helper today. His name is Nathanael, and he is doing this canning thing for the first time. He did not volunteer for the position but instead was coerced into it by his Grandma. We were down in the garden today and have some tomatoes harvested. You can see some of them on the table being sorted through to find the ripe ones to put in the canning pile.

Wait a minute. Is that worker fooling around instead of sorting?

Hours later, we are finally ready to can our tomatoes with a good selection on the counter. We had quite a wide variety this year due to many volunteers popping up all over our garden. Beef steaks, Burgundy Reds, Glaciers, Early Girls, Romas, and Large Cherry tomatoes. Really, really large cherry tomatoes.

Complicated, canning tomatoes

Nathanael learned the whole canning process this year. How to blanch the tomatoes in boiling water for 10-12 seconds and then quickly set in cold water in the sink. It is fun to see how easy it is to peel and core them this way. We work to get our jar funnel with hot lid seals and rings ready and waiting for us on the counter next to the stove. Nathanael getting jars tomato canning jar bath

After a simmer in the saucepan with us stirring constantly, we are ready for the next step. Pouring the hot tomato sauce into hot jars lined up on the counter, cleaning the jar lids and carefully placing the seal, and tightening the ring. During this simmering process for the tomatoes, we are also heating up our big canning pot “water bath” so we can seal the jars in it after we put the sauce into the jars.

Putting the jars into the boiling water bath is kind of tricky. Hot and a little dangerous. Canning has one of the strangest tools ever invented. Here is Nathanael getting used to the thing-a-ma-jig plier thingy used to pick up the steaming hot jars out of the boiling water. got tomatoes canned

Every year we put a supply of products; tomato sauce, catsup and salsa in the pantry covering our needs for the next 9-12 months. We also end up giving canned foods to family and friends but only if they return the empty jars. It is kind of an unspoken rule. We enjoy eating fresher, sweeter vegetables without additives.

Tomato People #7

Tomato People

Mom!

Mom! Are we there yet?

Son! We are five minutes closer to getting there from when you last asked!

Never a Dull Moment

Not Dull

It’s never a dull moment in our garden. As you go about weeding, watering, planting, trimming, and doing all the chores in the garden there is always humor to perk up your day. Just keep your eyes open and your imagination engaged and you will be surprised by all that you find.

Entertain Yourself

If you don’t believe me, then take a look at some of the garden people from the tomatoes today.

Have you ever seen a tomato critter like this? Does this tomato have a close relation to Bugs Bunny?

Check out those ears!

Looks like a much happier bunny with a body. Hmmm.

TomatoBunnyBody

Tomato Joy

Tomato Joy is arriving. Mr. and Mrs. Cherry were expecting a little bundle of tomato joy. They had gone to the hospital that morning and had been there many hours. They were both tired and getting a little concerned. It just seemed as though this child was taking forever to be born.

All of a sudden, Mabel’s contractions got harder and faster and the room got noisy. Everyone in the room rushed around, preparing for the new arrival. The little one finally arrived. Everyone smiled, feeling relieved. The doctor lifted the baby up, so the parents could see and said, “This is a surprise,

Congratulations! It is Triplets?

tomato triplet

Tomato Humor

Ready for some tomato humor?

What did the old tomato say to the young tomato?

Don’t you get saucy there with me youngster!

Why did Mrs. Tomato turn red? She saw Mr. Green Pea!

What did the young tomato say to the old tomato? You fill in the blanks!

Garden is Sanity

Blue Screen Sanctuary

Our garden is sanity for me. It is the place I go to do some weeding, watering, and picking. There are absolutely no screens to look at, and no phones to answer. I can hear the birds sing, play with dogs and kids, and get real dirty and never worry what people think of me. Anyone who knows me recognizes that is a really natural state for me.

Harvest Begins

At the end of the summer coming into fall, it becomes a lot more work as more and more produce needs harvesting and processing. My hands get blisters and dried out from all the washing, cleaning, cooking, and canning but the quality of the yummy food is well worth it throughout the following winter months. Here are some cucumbers getting ready to be pickled.

Buckets

Here are the buckets from this morning, tomatoes, dill herb, Dahlia’s, and tomatoes. Any kind of flower blossom brightens my day!
zuchini
A normal-sized zucchini is what I am holding. Honestly, it is how big they get all the time.

Tomato Sorting

sorting ripeness of tomatoes

Back up at the house, the tomatoes are washed and sorted into ripeness groups. The group on the right is red and ready to eat or can. The group on the left will get to sit in my vegetable baskets by the window to finish ripening. I’ll process them probably the next time I pick.

Harvest

The harvest doesn’t look real impressive sitting here on the kitchen countertop till you see the sizes of them compared to the size of my hand. These are oversized baking pans, so they look kind of normal but take a look at the third picture! Just slightly large aren’t they?

Potatoes

Zucchini, Yellow Crookneck Squash

Okay, the zucchini is the same way in deceit. They look small stacked there but average 3-5 lbs each. This is just 2 days from the last picking of both kinds. We are not planting this many squashes ever again.

Tomatoes

We love the sweetness of our own tomatoes. Sometimes I think there must be some sugar sprinkled on them but nope. We have a variety this year including, Early Girls, Glaciers, Beefsteak, and Large Cherry Tomatoes

Seeds

Set to dry for next year-green beans, lettuce, spinach, peaches, zucchini. We got ourselves a book about how to dry your own seeds. It has saved us a lot of money and now that we have done it a couple of years, it has become really easy. Definitely something worth looking into if you enjoy growing your own food.

peach and zuchinni seeds — peach and zucchini seeds