Tomato season has begun. In this, the best year in the garden ever, the tomatoes are also shaping up to be the best. I’m happy about the varieties I planted. Right now it’s all fresh eating and quick sauces. There’s insane quantity, but not enough ripe at the same time (what with all the fresh eating and quick sauces) to start up the canning machine in earnest. But I do think when all is said and done there will be sauce and canned tomatoes and salsa and probably also a lot of tomatoes just thrown into freezer bags. Because here come a lot of photos of green tomatoes on plants in the garden.
But first: today’s harvest which included 20 lbs of tomatoes.
The 20 lbs doesn’t include the bowl full (above), but did include this 1 lb 5 ounce Brave General tomato. Two others I picked from the plant today also weighed in at 1 lb. Brave General is a pink variety I got from Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co. I wasn’t sure about pink, but it really is pink and ripens into a deep raspberry color.
One reason I cut down on paste tomatoes this year is that they are not great producers. Who cares if paste tomatoes are meaty. In my experience they’ve been prone to early blight and I discard a lot of fruit while canning.
I always plant Supersweet 100s or 1000s, high producing cherry tomatoes. They are usually the most blight resistant, but not so with all the rain this year. However, they are still producing like crazy. And in their defense, I stressed them by transplanting them outside early. They make the best salsa.
And at a friend’s recommendation, I planted a saladette tomato, Principe Borghese. They’re recommended for making sun-dried tomatoes and I’ll put many in the dehydrator. I plan on using them for salsa, too. They seem to be the latest ripening of the group.
The only tomato I didn’t plant from seed is the Lemon Boy. They’re such good producers, so consistent, and add color variety like the pink. Lemon Boy is also usually an early producer, and though this plant is nearly dead, I’ve already had eight good-sized tomatoes from it with more to come.
While we’re in the dependable category, I also planted Cosmonaut Volkov, a delicious red slicer that, like Mortgage Lifter, always produces tomato looking tomatoes of good size and flavor. No cracking, blemishes, or blossom end rot. Tomato tomatoes.
There are two paste tomato plants out there, Opalka and Hog Heart pastes. Loaded with fruit and headed for quart jars in a few weeks. I bought these seeds from Fedco Co-op and Seed Company.
To introduce shape variety, I planted two “pleated” heirlooms. One I love and one has all the paste problems. The one I love is Rosso Sicilian. The fruits are small, beautiful sliced, and rich in color and flavor. They’re round, on the flat side, with well-pronounced lobes. They are great platter tomatoes. Well, the ones below will be in about a week…
The other pleated type is the Gezahnte (“toothed” in German). They also work well on a platter and are recommended for stuffing. I’ll probably end up using them in sauces instead, because they’re dry and meaty like other pastes.
But of all these tomatoes, my favorite is definitely the Bloody Butcher. The same friend who recommended Principe Borghese also gave me these seeds. But I also really loved a small tomato I grew last year whose name I don’t remember, and the description for Bloody Butcher came closest. These tomatoes are really cool. They are unblemished even when there’s blight on the plant. The unripe fruit has a great color; as it is turning red it retains some dark green striping at the top, which might keep the fruit from splitting. The plant is also great, with geranium leaves that required a fair amount of pruning but seem slow to blight. They will definitely stay in the rotation.
But the shishito. They blistered quickly on a hot grill while I made the fritters in a skillet. They were really done in 2 minutes, sort of popping or splitting open when they’re done.
