Tomatoes 2020

[Artorius]

@Artorius Those Auria paste tomatoes are hanging in bunches! They look like they would make good sauce.

@baymule
These are very good tomatoes for sauces, also for drying. They have a lot of dry matter.
There is a whole family of similar tomatoes. In Poland, we call them "fiutki". Fiutek is such a caressing name for the male reproductive organ Last year I grew varieties:

Eros

and Krasnyi Klyk / Red Fang with small tomatoes good for canning whole.

This year, apart from Auria, I also have the Drova / Firewood dwarf tomato.

 

[ducks4you]

@flowerbug, how to can up the tomato juice. Do you strain the tomatoes, then can them both up separately?
Curious...

 

[flowerbug]

@flowerbug, how to can up the tomato juice. Do you strain the tomatoes, then can them both up separately?
Curious...

doing juice is different than doing chunks.

for chunks we rinse off and then scald the tomatoes just enough so the skins will peel off, after i scald them i drop them in the sink full of cold water so they don't cook any more and they cool off enough to handle. it doesn't take all that long to scald them enough. then we core them and cut them into chunks and then i warm them up and put them into the jars, put on the lids and rings and then process them to seal.

for juice the time is spent differently, we still rinse them off, but then other than coring and cutting out the parts that aren't any good then they get cut up and put in pots to cook for a while. i use a potato masher to help the process go a little faster, but pretty much the more cooked they are the more juice you can extract. then we have a small food mill which lets you push the juice out through the grate at the bottom, but the skins and seeds stay up top. after enough turns you discard the skins/seeds and do some more. i dump the juice in a pot to keep it hot on low temperature and then i put that in jars and put on the lids and rings and process them to seal.

the time spent is about the same.

some people have juicing machines but i've never used one of those for juicing tomatoes so i don't know how well they work.

 

[ducks4you]

Thx!

 

[flowerbug]

Thx!

y.w. note that some tomatoes are really not all that great for juicing. the above examples of paste tomatoes pretty much all would be really hard to get much juice from. the various beefsteak varieties we normally grow are fine for us and all around use as eating fresh, juicing and putting up chunks. we don't make tomato paste. that takes too much time and IMO it is better to just go get a big can from the store if we need some for a recipe.

we have tried doing more chunky sauces and grown some paste tomatoes in the past but we both agreed that for the space it was better for us to stick to what has been working.

 

[baymule]

@baymule
These are very good tomatoes for sauces, also for drying. They have a lot of dry matter.
There is a whole family of similar tomatoes. In Poland, we call them "fiutki". Fiutek is such a caressing name for the male reproductive organ Last year I grew varieties:

Eros
View attachment 36656

and Krasnyi Klyk / Red Fang with small tomatoes good for canning whole.
View attachment 36657

This year, apart from Auria, I also have the Drova / Firewood dwarf tomato.
View attachment 36658
View attachment 36659

Haha, it’s easy to note the similarity. I am impressed by the clusters of tomatoes. I am having a tomato boom year. I grow Cherokee Purple and Mortgage Lifter. They make big tasty tomatoes but I have to cook them down all day to thicken up the sauce.

 

[flowerbug]

my initial estimate for seven buckets of tomatoes was 49 quarts when finished.

results were 22 quarts juice and 20 quarts chunks.

where did i lose out?

half a bucket of tomatoes not ripe enough to process and half a bucket of tomatoes that were rotten and should not have been in the buckets to begin with. Mom picks and sorts differently than i do. lol ok...

at least i did get it done yesterday, but now we know for the next picking.

 

[flowerbug]

picked again this morning, i was hoping to wait another day, but we looked and there were enough to make it worth it. almost nine buckets picked (around 180-200lbs). two buckets have to ripen a bit more in the garage on a table, but they'll be ready to get put into jars in a few days or a week or so. we decided to pick those that were mostly done because we really needed to water the tomato gardens and iffen we'd left 'em they'd have likely split.

this time though we did get them sorted mostly right so all the rotten ones are in the reject bucket already and i won't have to deal with them during the rest of the processing.

a bit of quick nap and then to it...

 

[baymule]

We just gave away a bunch of tomatoes. I told my husband I am not complaining about the bumper crop, but gosh I’m tired! So I went picking this morning giving thanks to the Lord for every one. Sure enough, we saw a friend with 3 kids and she was delighted to have them. It all works out for the good.

 

[digitS']

I'm not sure what to think of my 2 new pink tomato varieties this year. And, it's difficult to think about the one since I haven't tasted a single "Pretty in Pink" ripe fruit .

I didn't really need a 6 to 8 ounce "P in P", pink. Because of DW's tomato tastes, we have that base already covered. Still, maybe it is exceptional!

@flowerbug , with sprinklers running on the tomato patch 2+ times a week through the growing season, I can't afford to have crack-prone varieties out there. Pink cherries have consistently been ... crack-prone. So, it was somewhat exciting to see Sweet Treats described as crack-resistant!

Well, they are right at the foot of the backsteps and came on ripe and in good numbers a week or more ago. There hasn't been a single Sweet Treat that has cracked ... However. They're fine! But, they aren't much different from two favorites, Super Sweet 100 & Sweet Chelsea.

"Wait, those are red cherries!" you say. Yes, they are but one would have to be very persnicketive to insist that Sweet Treats are a pink color. To my way of thinking, their mild flavor might define them as a pink but I don't care about that. DW still hasn't expressed much of an opinion on them. It's fun having different colors - and there are red, golden, yellow, and ivory-colored cherries out there. But, they don't split ! It seems odd that there are so few pink cherries to choose from.

Steve