Just call me the tomato hoarder.

[Mr.Bill]

This year we decided to scale back the garden a bit. We usually plant 4-6 tomato plants. This year we only planted two, a roma and an early girl.

We blanch them then peel and bag then freeze them. Right now I have 16 quart freezer bags of them in my freezer. We are picking 15-20 of them every day and the plants have hundreds of tomatoes on them still. I've never seen so much production from two plants.

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Wow. Nice, eh? I guess the two plants realized that they had all of the room that the 4-6 plants

had before, and said, Wow, room to grow!! I wish I had gotten around to growing some, but we do have a nice farmer's market that we run to, that at the end of the day, those w/ lots of produce left over will try and get rid of it, thus not having to load it back up. But sometimes, it's better to go earlier and get the nicest choices before they're picked over.

Great news on your gardening skills!!

[Mr.Bill]

2. It could be the space.

They are planted in the same space where we used to plant 4-6 of them, although there are also two tomatillo plants in that space and they are doing well, too.

We live in a mobile home park, so we don't have a lot of room. These are the only plants we have in the ground. Everything else is in pots.

[Backseat Driver]

3. LOL, I'm picking daily from 6 romas; 1 early girl; 2 black krill and 2 millions cherry size

Making sauce to freeze from the romas for the winter - so far, about 5 quarts plain and w/basil
Eating a few BLTs from the early girl and krill slicers
Cherry tomatoes go into cold salads and hot budda-bowl types of stuff

Guess it's about time to share some with kids or neighbors.

It's been a much better year than the last in the North 40 Inches, though I too did not plant as much!

[keithbvadu2]

4. 253 varieties of tomatoes.

[Mr.Bill]

5. Wow! Very cool. n/t

[trof]

6. Whoa!

That's a LOT of 'maters!

[Warpy]

7. Back in my gardening days, I'd can as much as I froze

but I'd seed them as well as peel them. That way I didn't spend quite as large a fortune on quart canning jars as I might have and the tomatoes started to cook down during the canning process and made great sauce.

[Mr.Bill]

8. Yeah, my wife cans also. A lot of what we have frozen

will wind up in jars. We make tomato juice, our version of V-8 juice, which is a great way to use excess veggies and we even can Bloory Mary mix. We have a food mill to remove the seeds.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. Some years ago, as in about 30 years ago,

my sister told me about a neighbor of hers who decided to plant tomatoes, and proudly planted 30. She gasped, and told him gently that he'd planted far more than he needed for personal use. When the plants started producing tomatoes, he understood, and made an agreement with a local fast food place to give them his excess tomatoes.

I keep on wanting to grow tomatoes, because a ripened tomato is one of God's perfect foods (and I'm an atheist) that I want. I tried a couple of years ago and the tomato plants promptly died. Sigh.

[Retrograde]

10. I'm jealous - mine are doing horribly this year

the largest plant, Palo Alto, bred specifically for this location, has yet to flower. The Sungold had one fruit so far. None of the other 6 are over a foot tall. It hasn't been a particularly hot or cool summer, and even though I don't get a good crop until mid-September most years this is looking to be a total failure.

[Mr.Bill]

11. That's happened to me before.

I really don't know enough about gardening to know why.