garden tomatoes!

[Blackdog Lin]

They're here! It is so exciting! :)

Picked our first 6 Jetstars, and a dozen or so Juliets from the patio pots, last night. The Juliets are washed and chilling now for a Friday-night snackie later; and 3 of the garden ones will go in the fridge tomorrow morning to be ready for bacon-n-tomato sandwiches for brunch. We decided, after much deliberation, on bacon-n-tomato sandwiches as a delicacy worthy of the first tomatoes of the year.

All the tomatoes this year are a little worrisome - we have some sort of blight, where they're all yellowing and getting bad from the ground up. DH has sprayed fungicide once (per our 80-year old garden guru guy), and plans on hitting them all again this weekend. They're all loaded with fruit - so I'm hoping the spraying does the trick.

Isn't anyone else getting all atwitter at the prospect of great tomatoes?

[Tussiemussies]

Nothing like as garden grown tomato! Enjoy!

[awakenedsoul]

Oh yeah, Blackdog. I've been harvesting them for the last couple of weeks. I have cherry tomatoes, an heirloom variety, and Early Girls. They've all been delicious. I started leaving them out at room temp. The farmers from our co op recommend that. BLT's sound really good. I've made spaghetti sauce, had them in quesadillas, and in salads. Next I'm going to make some salsa.

[catherine]

Wow, we're way behind, but they're coming along! We do have some green fruit on our cherry tomatoes. There's nothing like homegrown tomatoes--DH refuses to even eat tomatoes in the winter because the taste just doesn't compare.

[Blackdog Lin]

We're the same way, catherine. We say that store-bought tomatoes are only tomatoes in the theoretical sense, not real ones. And we never purchase them. Off-season we only use canned (preferably home-canned) tomatoes.

(BTW, we ate like royalty today. the sandwiches were incredible.)

[ctg492]

My in laws from Florida love their garden tomatoes so much, how much you ask? Every summer on the trip to Michigan they bring the huge pots of tomato plants with them on the trip.

[CathyA]

I'm so envious! I won't have any for at least another month.
Blackdog Lin.........I used to always have trouble with some sort of blight growing from the ground up, until I started using a good amount of straw underneath the tomato plants, and haven't had problems since. Supposedly, the blight is in the soil, and when it rains it gets splashed up onto the bottom of the tomato plant, and grows from there. When you cover the soil well, this doesn't happen.

[Blackdog Lin]

Thanks Cathy, but that's not the answer in our garden. We heavily mulch the tomato plants every year with straw.