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Peak tomato season right now - 3 baskets 10kg (22lbs) each every other day. Canning full steam.
That's an impressive haul, freezing some of those tomatos whole in ziplock bags is a game changer for winter cooking - just run them under warm water and the skins slip right off!
If I manage to find some space in one of the freezers I'm going to freeze a bag to test it this winter - thanks for the suggestion!
I'll be canning a lot of it as passatas (regular and roasted), pasta and pizza sauces, ketchup - the target this year is 300-350 0.9L (~30oz) jars.
And some more
Looks so fucking good!!
Beautiful bounty. Congrats
How big is your grow op? Like how many plants you got going on there? I'm super jealous, my tomatoes have been decimated by bugs and blossom end rot, and I've been a bad plant parent since work and life and brutal heat have been kicking my ass this summer
Around 200 tomato plants, 75 in the greenhouse, the rest outside.
From my perspective gardening is about constantly being behind and gracefully accepting some losses. I'm very lucky: I work remotely for a company 6 time zones away, so I get to work in the garden before starting work at 3pm. On top of that while I do the literal heavy lifting in the garden my wife is actually putting more time in than me. Despite all that and liberal use of weed barrier and some raised beds we are at best getting close to not being very behind on garden work. Turning half an acre of a meadow into a veggie garden wasn't just ambitious, it was borderline insane ;-)
Beautiful! Sadly most of my heirloom tomatoes start developing rot as they ripen, with the exception of grape and cherry tomatoes.
It's the opposite for me. Cherry tomatoes get tomato blight first and most kinds of heirlooms tend to be the most resilient.
In the end all of them get blight, no matter what I do, even if I spray with fungicides multiple times. It's the reality of growing tomatoes in 6B zone - summer is short and as it gets colder during the nights the blight takes over. All I can hope for is to harvest as much as possible before that happens.
At the same time tomatoes in warm and dry (thanks to drip irrigation) greenhouse will remain blight free - I'll be picking the last ones shortly before the first frost outside.