Tomatoes - growing and preserving

Growing

I've grown tomatoes since I started gardening, and I've grown a lot of types and varieties over the years. I have a lot of struggles with bacterial wilt and leaf spot, and there aren't any varieties that are resistant to that problem. 

If I mulch the ground around the plants with a lot of leaves, and I trim the lower branches of the plants, I usually can delay the blight from hurting doing too much damage until the cooler weather comes to slow things down anyway. So that is my practical goal: ward off disease until the short growing season winds down.

I generally grow about 12 tomato plants -- usually a mix of beefsteak and paste. And I like indeterminate because they produce a lot more and stake better than the shorter, determinate bush-types. I used to grow all heirlooms, but they take too long to ripen, produce less, and generally get blight much earlier. If they tasted better, it would be worth it, but I've found some hybrids that I think taste just as good, so I don't really care about them anymore. I've been growing Jung's Beefsteak and I've been pretty happy with them.  I also grew Sunsugar cherry tomatoes that turned out really well; the plant was the healthiest of the bunch and it produced a lot. I'm not a big cherry tomato lover, so I don't think it is worth growing it again. I had thought that  there would be more demand from family members for these, so I think I'll give them a pass next year.

I'm still picking a few fruits, but I don't think I'll get much more from the plants this year. '

Preserving: Canning

The reason I grow so many plants is that I can tomato sauce and spaghetti sauce. I hope to try to can a few jars of tomato soup this year too.

As beefsteak and paste tomatoes ripen, I collect them in a bowl or tray on the table. I pick them before they are totally ripe because they ripen at room temperature off the vine just fine. We eat them fresh, of course, and I give some away, but what we don't use I core and put into freezer bags as they ripen. As the freezer bags fill up I move them from the regular freezer in the kitchen down to the chest freezer in the basement. After I have enough tomatoes to fill up our extra-large stock pot, I put the frozen tomatoes into the sink and run hot water on them. The skins slip right off and then I put them all into the pot and simmer them on the stove for several hours to cook them down and evaporate all the excess water off.

I like this method rather than the blanch and peel method because tomatoes ripen in some of the hottest weather, and boiling water to blanch and peel tomatoes in the heat of summer is miserable. I think running frozen tomatoes under water and simmering them down on a cool day in late summer or early fall is much more appealing. Some people just leave them in the bags and use them as need to make sauce throughout the winter and skip the canning process altogether. I don't do this because it would mean having my freezer filled with tomatoes and also because I like having the sauce all made at once and ready to go. 

Preserving: drying

I didn't grow paste tomatoes this year, so I ended up buying a small bucket of them at the farmer's market for $7 to slice and dry in the dehydrator. The strategy is to go to the market on a day when it is supposed to be cool for the next few days. Then run the dehydrator with the tomatoes -- maybe add some basil leaves to the top rack -- and it will help keep your home a little warmer without turning on the furnace, and will make your kitchen smell like summer one last time.