A Hit Or Miss Type Deal

Growing tomatoes in the fall is a hit or miss thing.  You are in a race with time and if you hit it right, it's a lot of fun.  Spring tomatoes can be good, but the battle with stink bugs, heat and humidity take a lot of luster off of the undertaking.  Fall tomatoes can be heartbreaking, too.  Several years ago we had a beautiful crop of big, healthy fruit on the vines... and then an early hard freeze came in November and dashed our hopes.  We ended up canning many jars of green tomato sauce that year.

This year the crop looked good.  No hard freezes to date and we've been picking lots of tomatoes.  Between what we've harvested and what's left on the vines, we could actually see a better harvest this fall than we did this summer.  In late summer I planted about nine varieties of tomatoes from seed.  We also had some that came up volunteer that I potted and nurtured throughout the dog days of summer.

One variety that has been SO productive are Chadwick Cherry tomatoes.  I didn't order these.  They came as a packet of FREE seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds.  Boy, am I glad I planted them.  Every day we pick them.  The fruit are larger than the normal cherry tomato you think of.

Chadwick Cherry

We also have larger tomatoes as well coming in: Creoles, Black Krim, Black Tomatoes, Cherokee Purple, Campari, Pink Brandywine.  Just this afternoon, we cut these up and made some Pico de Gallo that we promptly devoured with some chips.

Along with eating them, we're also putting some up for later.  With the Chadwick Cherry's, Tricia washes them up and freezes them whole.  She finds them easy and delicious to quickly thaw out and use as a base for cooking sauces for pasta.

The vibrant red color of the tomatoes really pop!

Today we talked about processing some of the tomato harvest and canning a bunch of jars of tomato sauce or perhaps, salsa as we still have a lot of tomatoes on the vine.  I think the 10 day forecast isn't anticipating any freezes.  If things hold up like they ought to, we'll put up a bunch of jars of tomatoes in our storage pantry this year.  And in just 30 more days, I'll be planting the spring tomato crop by seeds.  How nice to stretch out the tomato harvest almost year-round!