More tomato processing yesterday. Specifically, chopping up three quart bags’ worth of red tomatoes and filling two ice cube trays with juice. I’ve still got yellow pasta sauce to make, Romas to dry, and cherries to freeze. From the looks of my freezer, my next batch of tomatoes will need to be canned if I’m going to keep them.
“You should grow grape tomatoes next year,” Eric said the other day, selecting a cherry tomato from the small bowl I had placed that day’s harvest in. “They taste better.”
“You like cherry tomatoes?” I said in surprise. I know he likes them on salad, but I had never seen him popping them like candy the way he was right then.
“Yeah, of course.”
“Then why haven’t you been eating them?”
“Because I didn’t know you had that many until I saw them today.”
Today. When I’ve been picking them for weeks. I have a big bag of frozen cherries in the freezer because we weren’t eating enough salad to sustain them.
But I went to look for grape tomato seeds online and found that they’re apparently mainly a hybrid, or anyway the main variety, Santa, is, so I can’t simply save seeds from the tomatoes at the store. (I wouldn’t like buying tomatoes at the store in August anyway.) I’ll keep poking around and see what I can find. I’m more than pleased to adjust my plant planning so that Eric will eat more out of the garden.
I’m not so sure about his advice that I should plant fewer tomatoes next year, though. Sure, they’re a big mess–and I’m having a hard time keeping up–but I know I’ll use them all this winter. And besides, there are lots of other varieties that I need to try.
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August 22, 2007 at 11:08 am
Kim
Nice to find another good Ohio gardening blog! (I found you via Stuart’s Garden Blog Directory, btw.) I grew up about an hour south of Toledo but live in Cleveland now.
I have worked part time at a garden center this year, and FWIW we had an “heirloom” variety of grape tomato called Sweet Olive that I’m guessing would come fairly true from seed. The veggie expert guy at our place says that he’s grown them and they are tasty but they didn’t produce as much as the hybrids in the one year that he tried them–although admittedly that wasn’t a great tomato year around here.
Maybe seedsavers.org would have a grape variety or two as well? Just a thought.
August 22, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Jenny
Thanks, Kim! I checked Seed Savers and the only grape tomato they have that’s acceptably red (I made yellow pasta sauce the other day and Eric told me it needed food coloring), Christmas Grape, is inexplicably only available in one-ounce packets. But there are other places, and I’ll definitely keep an eye out for Sweet Olive–that sounds vaguely familiar, actually.