The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Waste not, want not

Italian San Rodorta tomatoesThe 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.

Imperfect tomatoesMeanwhile, 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.

Turn your invention into a part-time job that pays all the bills in just a few hours per week.



This post is part of our Organic Tomato Blight Control lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:





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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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