Harvesting tomatoes

I got a late start on tomatoes this year. Between the trip south to see my parents early in the spring and the time it took to get the garden deer-proofed early in the summer, I didn't even get seeds planted (indoors) until late April.

Among the seeds I planted was a type of paste tomato I'd never tried before called Federle. This variety came to my attention after I did a search for the meatiest type of heirloom paste tomato available. I found the seeds from a place called Tim's Tomatoes.

Due to various neglect issues on my part (ahem) as well as some hungry insects in the garden, hardly any of my original seedlings survived the transplant process with the exception of about six of these Federle paste tomatoes. They were so small and spindly, in fact, that I had no hope the ones I transplanted would survive.

Well, not only did they survive, they thrived and grew huge.

And my goodness, did they put out tomatoes. These weren't cute Roma-shaped tomatoes either, but big honkin' misshaped monsters that looked more like sausages or peppers than tomatoes.

It's not at all unusual in our neck of the woods to have the vast majority of tomatoes still green when the first frost hits. We kept the tomatoes on the vine for as long as we could, but finally the weather promised a drop to 29F, so Don and I hustled to strip the plants bare.

The oak tree gave a dramatic backdrop to our labors. It was a cold and blustery day as we picked. Despite the sunshine on one side, you can see some dark rain clouds in the back, which skirted around us.

I had only two beds of tomatoes (on the right), so Don and I each took a bed and started stripping the plants.

The first thing we discovered was the plants were insanely productive. Among those few plants that initially survived transplanting early in the summer, we got two full tubs of (mostly) green tomatoes.

We also pulled up the volunteer cherry tomato plants.

This was the afternoon's haul.

We pulled the tubs into the kitchen for the night and covered them with mosquito netting to keep fruit flies away. (We always seem to get fruit fly infestations this time of year, no matter how many jars of apple cider vinegar mixed with soap we put out.)

The next day I set the tomatoes up for ripening in the house. I started by laying the mosquito netting on the floor, then put down a flat (unopened) plastic garbage bag. This works to keep any moisture from damaging the carpet underneath.

Before storing the tomatoes, however, I wanted to see how much they weighed. One tub weighed 70 lbs.;  the other tub weighed almost 60 lbs.

That's nearly 130 lbs. of tomatoes from two garden beds. Yowza.

I set up a large cardboard box on the plastic, then started layering tomatoes. In most (but not all) of the layers, I added a banana, which exudes ethylene gas and helps ripen the tomatoes faster.

Between layers, I put sheets of newspaper.

Some of the tomatoes were huge. (Banana, as they say, for scale.)

When the first tub of tomatoes was layered in the box...

...I cut the box down and loosely sealed it closed.

Then I set up a second box and repeated the process with the second tub of tomatoes. The boxes are large enough that I could fit all the tomatoes in one box, but I didn't want to do this for two reasons. One, I didn't want the bottom tomatoes to get squashed; and two, periodically I'll be pawing through all the layers and removing ripe tomatoes, so it's better to have two boxes with fewer layers than one box with lots of layers.

After the second tub of tomatoes was packed away, I turned to the cherry tomatoes and separated the ripe from the unripe. I put the ripe tomatoes into the fridge for immediate use, and the green tomatoes got tossed onto the top layer in one of the boxes.

The very last thing I did was wrap the boxes in the mosquito netting. Kept away from fruit flies (which accelerates rotting), the tomatoes will ripen slowly over the next two or three months.

The plan is to check the boxes about once every 10 days or so and remove the ripe tomatoes, which I'll run through our food strainer and then freeze the pulp. When all the tomatoes have been puréed, I'll defrost the purée and cook it down slowly on the stove into tomato sauce, which I'll then can up.

These are seriously meaty paste tomatoes, so it will be interesting to find out how long it takes to cook them down compared to "regular" paste tomatoes like Romas or Amish Paste.

Another autumn chore, done.