Usually, at this time of year, I have a lot of green tomatoes. I listen to the forecast every night and when there is even a hint of frost I go out and gather them into cardboard boxes. I put the boxes in the basement and check for ripe ones each week. I generally have fresh tomatoes right up until just before Christmas. I love that. This year, things are different.
I planted seeds I had saved from just two of the four kinds I had previously grown. My heritage Bulls Heart tomatoes are huge while my purple ones are just two or three times the size of cherry tomatoes. I planted three of each, originally, but my purple ones must have crossed with some other variety as each of those three plants grew something different. While one continued to grow purple tomatoes, one grew beautiful, perfectly normal-sized red tomatoes, and the other grew long Roma-shaped ones that were full of seeds.
I have a second raised garden bed this year but since the earth for it didn't arrive early enough for me to plan properly for the addèd space, I just popped a couple more Bulls Heart seedlings in there when it did come.
The Bulls Heart ones are all ripened now and I am pulling out the plants. The others are extremely prolific and have recently been ripening faster than I can keep up with them. I am completely overwhelmed and feel like I am drowning in a tsunami wave of tomatoes.
Besides eating more tomatoes in the past couple of weeks than most people would eat in a year, I have been processing them in various ways. I have tomatoes frozen in containers and in freezer bags. I have made a couple of batches of slow-cooked spaghetti sauce, which also went into the freezer in mason jars. My freezer is now full but I still have three buckets of tomatoes in the house and more on the plants. I have given away a large number of tomatoes to at least 9 people, most of them, repeatedly.
I gave away my canning kettle earlier this year as I never grow enough in my small garden to can anyway. This year, of course, turned out to be the exception. This week I saw a YouTube video that showed me how to process tomatoes without a canning kettle. It involved putting the jars in the oven and the lids in hot water and getting the tomatoes just to the boiling point without actually cooking them. If all three elements are hot when you put the tomatoes in the jars and the lids on, the jars are supposed to seal. I started out thinking I would fill about 8 jars but then wisely decided to do just two the first time, just to see if it worked. Basically that took long enough to wear me out. And the jars had not sealed even by the next morning. I'm disappointed. I managed to put one of the jars in the freezer. The other is in the fridge. I will use it tomorrow or have to dispose of the contents since there are no preservatives.
I guess I will have to treat most of the remaining tomatoes the way people have always done with their zucchini and sneak around and leave them on people's porches. I'm really tired of dealing with the darn things!
But really, I must admit I will really miss having fresh ones up until Christmas this year. There are not likely to be any green ones in my basement this fall. I have never had so many tomatoes ripen so soon. The overabundance is only partially my own fault. The rest I will blame on climate change and all the heat we had this year. I will not plant more than my usual six plants next year but I am already wondering if I will save seeds of the beautiful normal-sized red ones, and hope they don't grow something else.
