We work a pretty big garden at Emily’s grandparents’ place. It’s somewhere around the size of Delaware I think. Planting is always a ton of fun and it looks so pretty when all of the plants are just starting to come up. Sometime in June though, craziness happens there. The tomatoes pop overnight and develop hundreds of little green wonders. Without any warning at all, they go from green to red (and on to nasty if we’re not careful) overnight! This year we have somewhere around 55 tomato plants and they each make 1 ton of tomatoes. So, yesterday, in the heat of the day, we crawled out into the garden to weed and pick and work on our tans…and pick tomatoes (and other stuff too…but more on that later) We picked a good number of tomatoes last week…probably 35-40 pounds. I was pretty proud of that…until this week. We kept picking and picking and picking. We weighed in when we got home (for this week…there’s always next week too!!) and found we had collected 81 pounds of tomatoes.
(this is about 2/3 of them…in my family room…)
Now I like tomato stuff. We love to make salsa and pizza sauce and just plain old tomato sauce, but 81 pounds all at once is a bit of a chore. We are fortunate to have a tomato press but it is still a ton of work processing the little squirting devils! I really need to get the child labor bit working better…
Y’all must have a bumper crop of Tomato Horn worms in that many tomato plants.
Time to heat up the kitchen and get to canning!
By the way the tomatoes you left at our house last time you visited were wonderful. The squash too. Thanks so much.
Holy Cats, Warren! I once bought 40lbs of tomatoes from a local farmer for canning and seeing them all laid out on the dining room table (and counters, and coffee table) made me want to cry. 81 lbs would send me into a panic attack! Amazing!
OMG!!! With that many tomatoes, you better do more canning and less blogging/facebooking! 😛
Happy canning!
Oh, my, goodness! I’m waffling between jealousy over the tomatoes and relief at avoiding the work…
Just kidding. Happy for you that you got so many great tomatoes! I can smell the hot tomato processing smell now…
That’s a lot of ‘maters!
Butch is contemplating canning this year. As usual, I will be his helper.
We had our first ONE on Sunday. BLT’s, YUM!
81 pounds?!? Maybe you should open your own store.
I am still processing them…I do a crockpot full each night and let them cook down into sauce so I can can them the next night…gosh I hate tomatoes…