Tomato month

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

Tomato month

Roma tomatoes August is the month of the tomato on our homestead. Unless we have a very dry summer (unusual for us), I spend almost a fifth of my August garden time battling the blight. I've (mostly) learned not to get my blood pressure up as the dead leaves progress up the stem, and to simply make the best of the fruits our plants do ripen. Inevitably, the blight wins, but not before we've filled our larder with enough rich, red pulp to feed us until next year.

Meanwhile, half my time in the kitchen revolves around the tomato too. This year, we've been pushing soups as hard as we can, since that seems to be our favorite kind of preserved bounty during the cold months (and does triple duty, putting away green beans and corn as well as tomatoes). This weekend's haul, though, was so extreme that I first pulled out the prettiest romas to slice in half and dry, made a few gallons of soup, and then ended up with Drying tomatoes a bowlful of leftover tomatoes to turn into ketchup.

Of course, the garden is also churning out lots of other produce --- watermelons, cucumbers, summer squash, basil, parsley, cutting celery (a new experiment for us this year), mung beans, sweet corn, green beans, okra, Swiss chard, fall raspberries, and probably a few other things I've forgotten. But tomatoes draw my attention the way I've been told exposed breasts attract the male eye --- it's hard to look at anything else when the plump, round orbs are on display.