Saturday, September 5, 2015

2015 - The Year of the Tomato

The last two years, our tomato harvests have been pretty abysmal. Our first year, the wacky weather killed off a lot of our plants. Last year, without the fence, the chickens annihilated any chance of tomatoes. So, this year! This year! With remineralizing our soil (yes, I know, I need to dedicate a post to that!), our garden has been doing awesome. That and the fence.

Since we love tomatoes and tomato products through the winter, I came into this summer prepared. I started some of my own plants and bought other heirloom varieties from a farmer friend. All in all, we started the summer with 2 dozen tomato plants. Cherokee Purple, Mortgage Lifter, Bonny's Best, Pineapple, Black Krim, German Johnson, Amish Paste, Italian Heirloom, Stupice, Gold Medal, San Marzano, Sun Gold, and Black Cherry have all outdone themselves this year.


While I haven't been weighing each harvest to keep track, I do know we used 48 pounds for barbeque sauce and ketchup. We have 12 quart bags frozen of roasted tomato sauce and 14 jars of plain tomato sauce canned. We like to keep things plain around here so we can spice them up when we use them this winter. Our plants show no signs of stopping and I'd guess we've harvested at least 300 pounds.


We've also harvested 100 pounds of potatoes, 3 pumpkins, 18 Delicata squash, and we could actually grow decent carrots this year! How did YOUR garden do?

3 comments:

  1. AWESOME! I am a terrible gardner and would rather support small farmers, lol. I love tomatoes too. Thanks for sharing.

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    1. Thanks Bobbi! I love tomatoes so I'm thrilled they are doing so well this year. We are fortunate to have several farmers markets in our area as well and we have certainly utilized those in the past for our tomato fix :-)

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