Manna

This is our daily manna.

And I hope it will be for a long time yet as it ripens. Daily tomatoes. Maybe not for 40 years or anything, but until December would be nice. Then we'll be looking for a bit of change.

It's the end of September and we've had no frost yet. That's amazing, but I decided not to risk all of our tomatoes to some unannounced dip in the temperature. Today I stripped all of the green tomatoes, ripped the plants out of the ground and buried the greens to do a bit of decomposing underground.


I had a bit of help for a short time.

Incidentally, I made that top one afternoon this summer out of two tops of mine that I was tired of. Isn't it lovely?

Incidentally, I also made the girl wearing it. Isn't she lovely? I had a bit of help there too. In some things it's best not to work alone.

This is the best yield I've ever had from tomatoes. I always rely on my mother-in-law for any quantity worth canning, but I have to stop being so dependant. There's talk of them leaving the farm and then what would I do? Her garden would shrink from it's current 1/2 acre (or so) to a few potted houseplants. That would produce very few tomatoes. Suddenly toasted tomato cheese sandwiches would become less frequent around here. We can't have that! For the first time ever, I harvested more from my own garden than we had donated from hers. Yay me!

One of those boxes contains about two layers of ground cherries.

That was one very prolific plant! I'd never heard of ground cherries before this year, but we've been enjoying the tiny fruits for a week or two now. Alice loves them, so we have to rush to beat her to the ripe ones. These ones are not ready yet and I'll be freezing them like all of our berries - on cookie sheets in the freezer and then into a big Ziploc bag. I'm not sure how I'll use them yet, but you can apparently bake with them and use them any way you would a raspberry or cherry.

Although too many of our tomatoes are of the cherry variety (yellow, red and dark purplish), there are quite a few roma types (Mama Mia) and this:

I don't know what kind it is because it must have come from my mother-in-laws seedlings. (I know - my dependance is still showing, but I did successfully seed the Mama Mia and Stupice varieties.) Remember that I have pretty big hands. Beth thought this was a pumpkin growing next to the house. There were about four like this all on one plant. I had to tie the tomato cage to the clothesline above it to stop it from collapsing and possibly breaking off the stem. This one big tomato and it's four similar siblings are currently in jars being processed.

Besides what is in these boxes, I've already got 7 litres canned. I know I can buy a can of Aylmers Tomatoes for about $1.50, but it feels good to know where these came from and how they were processed.

I'll have to take a picture of my depleted garden, but it makes me sad to look at it. There are only the flowers, small leeks, potatoes, carrots and beans left. I'm still picking one serving of beans every few days so I'm letting them hang in there. It's been a weird growing year.