Waste not, want not
The
final element of our tomato campaign is "never waste a tomato."
Mark and I completed our vine-ripened
versus indoor-ripened tomato taste test
last week, concluding that the former had just a hint of extra
flavor. Still, the kitchen-ripened tomatoes were ten times better
than storebought. So when I had to pull out three blighted tomato
plants last week, I first picked every tomato that had at least begun
to whiten and am now ripening them under the kitchen counter.
Meanwhile,
fruits with a bit of blossom end rot or a cosmetic crack are fine additions to sauce
--- just slice off the troubled spot. On the other hand, our volunteer tomato
plant turned out not to be worth saving even under these drastic
conditions. I suspect the volunteer came from a storebought
tomato seed, because fully two thirds of the fruits that I left on the
vine to ripen rotted before turning red. I guess those hard, pink
tomatoes in the grocery store don't
ripen all the way, no matter what you do. That vine came out to
give more space to its neighbor.
| This post is part of our Organic Tomato Blight Control lunchtime
series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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