2015 SFG in Brooks, Ga

Yes, holy cow! Will you be making various products like canned tomatoes, salsa, spaghetti sauce? Or just getting them all processed for the freezer?

Loaded up my dehydrator.  Hope it does a nice job.  The only thing I have used it for in the past is Basil.  2 racks of grape tomatoes, one rack of bell peppers (green, red, yellow), One rack of slicing tomatoes (Mt. Merit, Goliath, Gilbertie) and some green beans to test, One rack of eggplant.  We shall see how it all works.  I decided to try dehydrating.  I usually freeze things but am branching out this year.  I still have to run the slicing tomatoes thru the food mill and will just freeze the tomato juice.  When I get time I will boil it down and make it into some type of sauce.

To be continued.  Off to water the garden.

I'm glad you posted this. I forgot about drying tomatoes. Got to try it. How do you store them?

sanderson wrote:I'm glad you posted this.  I forgot about drying tomatoes.  Got to try it.  How do you store them?

This is the first time I have tried to dehydrate anything other than basil.. But from what I saw on the internet, a glass jar, zip lock bags, etc.

Maybe Camprn will come along and answer this for you,  I think she does a lot of dehydrating.

Oh my goodness!  What a beautiful haul.  My wife just looked over my shoulder and said, "We never get that much!"  She's right... I've never gotten a haul that large.  My tomatoes are are still green, except for an occasional Sungold.

If the offer still stands, we would love to have some tomatoes (of any kind).  Just drop on by whenever you like.  it would be nice to see you again and you can see how your eggplants are doing (aphid attacked at the moment, but still doing well).  Don't mind the lawn... it's time again (argg).

Update:  My daughter just wandered into our bedroom and when I showed her your photograph, her eyes bulged so big I thought she was a bug!

Congrats on your summer harvest, and good luck with your dehydrating! 

I am in love with my dehydrator; I can't wait till my peppers fruit so I can slice and dry them for stews and chili this winter.

yolos wrote:Guess what I will be doing today ?


Windmere - do you need any tomatoes.  I could drop them off on my way home or to work on Tuesday??  But maybe you already have enough from your harvest.

I finally finished processing most of these tomatoes that I harvested last week. 

I ended up with:
3 cups dehydrated grape tomatoes
11 cups tomato sauce (to be frozen)
11 cups of stewed tomatoes (to be frozen)
4 cups roasted tomatoes (to be frozen)

Now its off to the garden to harvest what appears to be just as many tomatoes as last weeks haul. 

I am starting to get serious diseases on my Gilberties so I will have to remove them soon.  Next most affected by disease are the Brandywines.

The easiest method for me was the tomato sauce.  Last year I bought a Weston Roma Food Strainer & Sauce Maker.  All you have to do is quarter the tomato and throw it in the hopper.  Turn the crank and out comes very watered down tomato sauce.  Then cook it down for quite some time and you have tomato sauce.  Easy peasy.  No skinning, no coring, no deseeding.  The appliance does it all for you.  It is especially helpful if you are processing large slicing tomatoes that have lots of seeds (if you don't want seeds in your sauce).

Wow yolos!  You are having some awesome results.  I'm sorry about the diseases your plants are going through, but at least production is good.  I want to try to dry some tomatoes (my wife and I cook with sun dried from time-to-time).  Your tomatoes are so vibrantly red.  I'm confident that those sauces will be some of the best you've ever tasted!

Thanks Windmere.  FYI, the redness of the tomatoes is a result of the camera.  They are really all not that red.  some of them are, but not all.

Here is this weeks tomato harvest - 07/10/15
I haven't decided whether I am going to process these or just give them away.  I think I remember reading a previous thread where someone just threw them in the freezer and processed them later in the year.  I may have to try that this year.

Now that would be a nice gift for a fresh veggie lover!

Around here, we usually pass extras around to our neighbors. But there are also a number of people I've spoken to who give extra fresh veggies to the local food banks. Boy those folks must get sick to death of zucchini! But fresh veggies are a real treat when you're used to the soggy, blecchy-tasting canned stuff.

that's a whole bunch of tomatoes. I have frozen tomatoes before making sauces last year and the end result tasted pretty darn good. Good luck to you and finding what to do with all those.

Good heavens, Yolos!  Those look terrific!

What I like to do w/ the excess is juice them and boil them down to a sauce that's the thickness I like.

Then I pour 2 cups in a parchment-lined brownie pan and dehydrate.  (My dehydrator will take 2 pans per tray.)

The end product is a thinnish sheet of tomato paste-type stuff that I can seal-a-meal.  Then, when I need 2 cups of sauce, I open a sheet & re-hydrate.

Todays Harvest - 07/17/15 - Still getting bucket loads of tomatoes and pole beans (Fortex and Rattlesnake).  I still had a lot of beans left on the vines but it became too dark to see them.  Now I just have to process them all. UGH


Last weeks corn harvest - Early Sunglow

Fresh picked corn!

yolos wrote:...Now I just have to process them all. UGH...

You're getting some bountiful harvests this year.   When do you find time to work?!

boffer wrote:Fresh picked corn!

yolos wrote:...Now I just have to process them all. UGH...

You're getting some bountiful harvests this year.   When do you find time to work?!

HA, I am retiring on or about 8/7/15.  Yippee. 

As of now, the question is "When do you find time to sleep?".   So I work, come home, wait till it cools off a little and then harvest or water until dark.  Then process what I harvested and hope to get at least 5 hrs sleep.

You be sure to let us know when you become a one digit midget* so we can help you count down!


(*military speak for one having less than 10 days before discharge)

boffer wrote:You be sure to let us know when you become a one digit midget* so we can help you count down!


(*military speak for one having less than 10 days before discharge)

Ok, will do but is this 10 working days or just 10 days.  I am counting working days which is 15 days if the new person starts when she said she would.

Rather than using 'days', I should have said 'wake ups'. 10 straight wake ups.

Yolos
 What a beautiful harvest! 15 days to retirement, now that has too feel good!
How do the Fortex beans compare to the Rattlesnakes? I took your advise on the rattlesnakes and love them. Had a banner spring with them this year.
 Craig

TCgardening wrote:Yolos
 What a beautiful harvest! 15 days to retirement, now that has too feel good!
How do the Fortex beans compare to the Rattlesnakes? I took your advise on the rattlesnakes and love them. Had a banner spring with them this year.
 Craig

Thanks TC.  Unfortunately, I haven't tasted the Fortex yet.  I have frozen three dinners worth but have not yet eaten any. I am specifically growing them on the request from my daughter's mother in law.  So when she comes to visit,  I will let you know when I do eat some.  I will say that in this heat they are not as productive as the rattlesnakes.  I only get about half the amount of fortex compared to rattlesnake.  The thing I like so far, the fortex do not have strings.  I can't seem to pick all the rattlesnakes young enough to keep from getting strings.

I finally broke down and bought a couple of soaker hoses.  This is my latest planting of Silver Queen corn.  Today I pulled the dirt up around the base of the plants to try to keep them upright if we get wind.  Then I added some fertilizer and a soaker hose and then heavily mulched with wheat straw.  That ought to save me some time not having to hand water this bed.


I covered the bed with Tulle after planting the seeds.  I have had a hard time with some animal (most likely birds) digging up and eating seeds of everything I planted this year so I covered it with tulle.  I decided to leave it up until the corn reaches the top of the tulle.  But when I was working in the bed today, I found three small worms munching on the leaves.  I don't know how they got in there but I will have to spray with some BT tomorrow night.

This guy came to visit my garden today and scared the crud out of me.  I am afraid of snakes so I didn't get too close.  I kept trying to scare him out of the garden because he just kept going from bed to bed exploring everywhere.  I threw rocks, boards, Tonka truck, whatever I could get my hands on.  Stomped on the ground, hit the sides of the wooden beds with a shovel.  Finally, I stepped on the hose and almost fainted.  That gave me an idea.  I turned the nozzle onto full stream.  The water inside the hose was warm from sitting in the sun.  I hit it with a blast of water and it started to crawl out of the last bed it had been exploring.  I didn't see where it went so I went inside for an hour or two.  When I came back out to the garden, instead of wearing my flip flops like I normally do, I had on some heavy combat style boots that I wore for the rest of the day.


In the first picture he is coming out of the bottom right hand corner of the bed with the cosmos and slithering across the pathway.  In the second picture you can see him slithering across the aisle about the left center of the picture.  You really cant see too much unless you expand the picture.  I have no idea what kind of snake it is.  But it is the fourth snake I have seen in the last two weeks but the first one to find my garden.  it was humongous.  About 6 feet long and the body was about the thickness of my wrist.  UGH.  I hate snakes.  I will probably have nightmares for weeks.


Now every time I go out into the garden I am going to have to look around to make sure nothing is slithering around.  I wish I had been able to get a good enough picture to determine what kind of snake it was.  Dark brown with faint black markings across the back.

Yes, I think I would react without dignity if I stumbled across a snake in my back yard.