Tomatoes Are About to Finish up

The Spring 2017 Tomato Crop is tapering off now.  The onslaught of the heat and humidity coupled with platoons of stink bugs have the tomato plants waving white flags of surrender.  I've learned a trick that extends the harvest a bit.  The trick involves picking the fruit when you see the first tinge of pink.

I then bring the "just-barely" pink fruit indoors where it can ripen without bug, bird, and squirrel competition.  We have a staging area made up of three platters. Here is an example:  On day 1, you can see the fruit I picked today, mostly green, but with a hint of pink.

Overnight they ripen somewhat on the tray and by the morning, the tomatoes are sporting a reddish color

By day 3 the tomatoes have turned from mostly green to red or blackish-color, depending on the variety.  We grow a number of varieties

Once they are ripe we'll begin to consume them.  Tricia likes to make an Italian tomato salad that she enjoys eating.  It has fresh homegrown purple onions mixed with tomatoes and olive oil and basil

And who can forget about fresh homemade Pico de Gallo.  We can absolutely kill a bag of tortilla chips and a 2 quart container of this stuff.  It has chopped tomatoes, onions, jalapeno peppers, cilantro and the juice of limes with some salt and pepper.

We also slice tomatoes and eat them, dehydrate tomatoes, and can a bunch of them. Here we have quarts of salsa.  In the center, you can see some jars of green tomato sauce.  This came about when we had a hard freeze that popped my Fall crop of tomatoes.  Green tomato sauce is very good, believe it or not!

Then we stewed twenty-something jars of chopped tomatoes that we'll use for cooking when we no longer have fresh ones at our disposal.  Notice the jar of stewed yellow tomatoes below.

We'll still have tomatoes coming in from the garden for a while, but we are stocking up on the inventory of tomatoes in various forms.  Believe it or not, it is only a couple of months before we'll start our fall tomato plants from seeds.  Aside from the summer, we have tomatoes going in some form or fashion.