Tomato Season!

In my world, August is the season of the tomato.  For some gardeners, the season starts earlier...but I decided to use heirloom varieties this year instead of the plethora of hybrids available as seed, or as transplants at most garden centers in our area.  That means my season starts later than that of other tomatoes.

Nothing against the popular Big Boy, Better Boy, or Early Girl varieties - my garden neighbors have allowed me to take enough of these cultivars to be quite familiar with them - but my garden's goal was canning.  The transplant-ready beefsteak varieties would have worked, but I had loftier goals.

I wanted local, heirloom, uniquely named, canning-style tomatoes.  And for the most part, that's what I got.  But then, the romantic names such as "Green Zebra" and "Red Brandywine" and "Pineapple" distracted me.

"What fun it would be to grow these," I thought.  And indeed, they were fun...but as fun as they were, these cultivars weren't exactly ideal for canning.

Now, just because a variety isn't "specially selected" for canning doesn't mean you can't use it for that purpose.  A Brandywine can find its way into a pint-sized canning jar just as well as a Roma or Amish Paste.  But as I found out the hard way, it just means that you'll have a lot more juice, and not a lot of "meat" in the tomato's wall lining.  In other words, a lot of work to peel and seed the tomato without a lot of reward for the effort.













Great....that means that nearly 26 pounds of tomatoes harvested in a single week boiled down to 5 pints of canned diced tomato.

But on the up-side, they look AMAZING!

There would have been much less work for me had I grown more of these:

This mango-sized beauty is the Amish Paste.  It originally hails from the great state of Wisconsin, and I LOVE THIS TOMATO!!!  Very few seeds, thin skin, and all meat.  Pretty disease resistant, too.  I've had some trouble with blight and insects, so every little defense counts.

But isn't that what gardening is all about?  Learning from things that didn't work as well as you'd hoped.  And it's been fun, seeing the little plants poking their heads out of the soil, then sending out the yellow flowers, and finding tiny green tomatoes hiding within the foliage.

And harvesting!  It's like an Easter-egg hunt, only better...because you can come back to the same hiding place again and again...and always find another ripe tomato, just waiting.