The Fall Tomato Crop

Our fall tomato crop was producing well, not in huge abundance, but good nonetheless.  And then in December temperatures dropped for one night to the upper 20's.  There were pounds and pounds of green fruit on the tomato vines and so on the night of the freeze, Tricia and I picked baskets and baskets of green tomatoes of all varieties.  

We arranged them on trays on the table and covered them with cardboard boxes that we had flattened out.  Each morning we would sort them, moving the pink ones to a separate tray.  As they ripened we moved them into the fridge.  Almost every single one of the tomatoes ripened indoors.  We knew we had to do something quickly with all these tomatoes as we barely had room for anything else in the ice box.  So we pulled them all out.  Here is an overhead shot of some of them:

And here is a big heaping basket full of Chadwick Cherry Tomatoes.  These tomatoes right here produce and produce!

Tricia likes to cook with these.  We bagged up all of the Chadwick Cherry tomatoes and put them in the freezer.  There were exactly 10 pounds of cherry tomatoes!

With some of the bigger tomatoes, we made pico de gallo.  Actually, I made it.  I call it Gringo Pico.  Simple, simple, simple.  Cut tomatoes, cut onions, cut peppers cilantro, salt and pepper and lime juice.  Good stuff!  We like to put it in the fridge overnight and let the flavors "percolate."

Here's the money shot: 

That's a little over 5 pounds of pico de gallo!  Tricia and I almost finished this off for lunch today with some chips.

For the rest of the tomatoes, we decided to can the cut up tomatoes into pint jars.  First we scalded the tomatoes, cored them, and removed the skins.  Then we roughly cut up the tomatoes so that they would cook uniformly.

After adding salt and pepper, we put the cut tomatoes in a pot and let them cook.

Tricia added salt and citric acid to each jar and then ladled the cooked tomatoes into the canning jars.

We put these jars in a water bath canner when the water was boiling.  When the time was up, we removed them and ensured that the jars sealed.  They were placed on the kitchen counter to cool.  Once cool, we'll remove the rings and stack the 12 jars of tomatoes to the pantry.

Between freezing, making pico de gallo, and canning, we put up 30 pounds of tomatoes!  That doesn't count all the fresh tomatoes that we ate or cooked with prior to preserving the harvest.  It was actually a better crop than the spring toms.  That's to be expected.  Less heat and humidity and less bug pressure.

As soon as we got all these tomatoes put away, we got all the tomatoes started from seed.  They should be germinating shortly and we'll see if we can have a good spring crop as well as what we just experienced in the fall.