First Big Fruit Pull

[z_willus_d]

I got back from a week long work trip to find a large number of ripe tomatoes (those the birds left me) hanging on my dilapidated vines. I expect this will be my penultimate harvest with these poor plants, but I'll at least get another good load in before they croak, I believe. Holding a 3/4 full paper grocery bag, I had the dual thoughts: (1) wow this is a lot of beautiful looking fruit; and (2) Hmm, I've heard a heathy tomato plant can produce well over 20lb in a season and that's around what I've got here in this bag. So, yes, bitter sweet knowing that my plants are on course for producing closer to 4-6lb per. But that's ok. The maters are tasting great!

And that's despite the fact that most are cracking. Here's what happened. I have this nice irrigation setup with 6" of redwood bark mulch. It's great. The irrigation spreads out evenly from above using a large number of micro-sprayers. I can introduce enough water for the week in around 10-15 minutes depending on how hot it's going to be. Well, I got side tracked a couple weeks back and forgot to turn the water off. It was on for more like eight hours. After that, beside the $60 increase to my water bill, which I just payed minutes ago, I also noted that nearly every tomato (save the cherries - sungold) were cracking. I hadn't watered in over 2 weeks when I harvested these tomatoes.

The first two pics I posted below show about half of the tomatoes I harvested, which I kept to eat on BLTs, sandwiches, salads, etc. I have a number of mysteries in there, a PBTD, Pink BW, BrandyBoy, Red BW, NAR, three Dwarfs (PP, YQ, IR), Cher P, Wes, Casino, Costaluto Gen, and several other varieties. Standouts for taste so far have been Goose Creek and KBX, the latter of which you may view as the orange in my pics below. It was delicious and large! The Goose creek pumps out a large number of fruit, some with BER, while the KBX only managed three. Disease and pest pressure are huge problems in my garden this year.

The other half of tomatoes from the harvest (not shown) where milled down and reduced into the sauce you see in the final pics. It's well thickened and smells amazing. I haven't yet tasted it. I'll be canning most of it for future consumption.

So in summary, while this year has been a huge disappointment in a number of ways (example, I pulled out 14 plants at my work garden that had trunks like a large sappling's), I can't deny the exuberance of enjoying the perfection of that KBX on our Turkey-burger sandwiches the other night. It almost makes all the work and monetary "investment" worth it. I'm guessing with this sauce on our next pizza, I'll get there.

Best to all-
--naysen