Bye Summer Hello Tomato

We’ve basically had beautiful weather here in East Tennessee since the heat began to wane about mid-August. All good things must come to an end however and last Thursday it ended with a bang. We had two cold fronts blow thru within 12 hours and that night the weatherman was on the border about whether or not to predict frost. Well frost slipped across the border during the night and we awoke Friday to a heavy covering of frosty white. Friday morning also initiated the start of the winter heating bill season as I slid the thermostat control from Off over to Heat.

We have a garden every summer and it generally does well. We plant about 25 tomato plants along with various kinds of peppers and some years (not this one) squash and green beans. This year I got our tomatoes in the ground about a month late, about mid-june. That ‘one month’ late has thrown the harvest two months late… funny how that works. When the frost hit last Thursday we had tons of ripe and almost ripe tomatoes on the vines. So Friday evening I went out to pick the remaining goods ones. I kept picking and picking until I lost most of the sunlight. At the end of the evening I had 16 gallons of tomatoes. Yes, that was Gallons with a ‘G’ and there were 16 of them.

So what does one do with 16 gallons of tomatoes? Well, we canned them until we ran out of canning jars. No more jars means we hit our storage limit and no more canning! So now we’re trying to give tomatoes away and attempting to eat everything tomato we can think of. (I guess our licopine levels will be high for a while.) As I write this a bunch of them just left via two nice friends from church. Now we’re down to six gallons.

They say if you eat too many carrots you’ll turn a light shade of orange… check with me next week as I may be a nice shade of red!