This is what 101 lbs of tomatoes looks like.

Hey there darlings. Welcome back to Roots & Refuge. We are hiding in the shade of the tomatoes presently because it's the middle of the day. I really don't like shooting videos in the middle of the day because the light is so harsh and the photographer in me is like, don't do it. But tomatoes are best harvested during the heat of the day because their sugars are the most concentrated, their water content is the lowest, and we have thunderstorms blowing in this evening. So I've got to harvest them when I'm going to get the best flavor out of my tomatoes. The video is going to have to take the back seat. I didn't want you guys to miss out though because this is definitely going to be the first. I know that it's going to be the first really big tomato haul of this year. I've been pulling in a few here and there. I come in with a shirt full pretty much every time I go back to the house, but I've got a lot to pick. This basket is going to be woefully insufficient, I'm afraid. And I just wanted to share it with y'all because this is the fun part of gardening. I love all of it and we don't just do it for the harvest, but the harvest is definitely fun. So this row right here I planted first. So they're obviously fruiting first. I've got some up the high tunnel too. Actually have a couple of branches here that are going to need to be pinned up. These are carbon tomatoes. Ideally when you're harvesting tomatoes, I actually like to do it in boxes, especially if I'm trying to take them anywhere to share with anybody. I like to do them in boxes in one row. Today I'm going to pile them into the baskets because I'm going to go ahead and process all of these. Unfortunately these were growing kind of wedged up between the plant and the panel and I tore that one. That's probably the biggest tomato I've gotten this year. This one had like a yucky spot. So typically when I've got gross ones that are not going in the house, I'll just leave them on here and then I'll come back through with a pig bucket or a chicken bucket and gather them up and throw them to the animals. So you know, they're not wasted. These guys are super productive this year. So normally if I had like a tomato like this that's obviously blushing but still green, if they were going to be dry for the next couple days, I would leave this on and let it ripen more on the plant. But since we're, you know, likely going to get some rain, I don't want to leave this where it would split. Splitting is just caused by inconsistent watering, which sometimes you can control. But when it comes to rain that's coming, obviously I cannot control that but I can just prepare for it. So like the ones that just split while I was pulling them, I'm still going to take those into the house because I can process them right away. But the ones that were out here split, those will likely have bugs inside of them. I'm having to get down on the ground so I can actually see. Whoa. All right guys, this has got to be, this is my biggest tomato this year for sure. Oh dang. Look at that. That's crazy. It's very faciated. Look, it's two tomatoes that grew together. Actually, probably three. And this one was growing right next to it. Okay, I'm gonna gather these up. This is everything off of five plants. Carbon tomatoes. These are all carbon, which this is the one that I was saying I think is going to replace Paul Robeson at the very top of my favorite list. Because when these things are really ripe, they taste just as good as Paul Robeson. They've got that dark purpley tomato kind of smoky deep flavor. And they're so productive and they just grow really large. In my experience, the plants stay a little on the healthier side than the Paul Robeson plant tends to. Look at that. And there are a few here. This one was just growing between the cattle panel and the plant. It was just pinched and it started to rot from the inside. So those will go to the chickens. And these plants are still loaded with really huge blushing fruit. And they're still setting fruit. So I mean I've got way more growing up high here. Let's see. I'm guessing this is around 25 pounds, maybe upwards of 30. All right. Just gonna hang out in the shade, huh? All right. Next, let's go to Thorburn's terracotta. Y'all, these are seriously some of the best tasting tomatoes I've ever had. I love this tomato so much. Sadly, some of these had split and were a little on the buggy side. We'll give those to the chickens. Bugs are like sprinkles for them. Not for me. I typically try to plant like kinds together so I know what I'm harvesting. But I got these a little mixed up because I've got some. These are large barred boars. Nice and ripe. I think these tomatoes are so cool looking. They look almost like the sheen on them is almost metallic. I don't know if I can capture on camera, but does anybody else think that? Have you grown large barred boar? Like the green stripes have this metallic sheen. They're so pretty. That weird little guy. That comes from faciated blossoms. It's just multiple tomatoes growing together, but that one is strange looking. I picked a couple of these a little sooner than I might would have otherwise, but they were kind of tucked back there and I didn't want to risk not seeing them and them getting too ripe. Now here, these are Aunt Ruby's German Greens. First, I thought this was like Thorburn's terracotta that was just not ripe yet. With these, you can tell when they're turning by just squeezing them and they're just, this is a very, I mean this feels like a fully soft ripe tomato. It just is still green because that's the variety. Here, I've got wild boar farms. I think this is Blue Beauty. That is pretty beautiful, I say. All right, here's everything that is ripe enough off of two plants. Little basket number two. Oh, this one's heavier than the first. So I just came down here on the other side of the rows. So this is the Black Beauty, which Black Beauty and Blue Beauty are really similar. You can see this one's not ripe. So this, all this purple, this is getting a lot more sun than those that were tucked under all the foliage. That anthocyanin develops because of sunlight. Like here, oh no, this is actually, this is another large barred boar. A few of these are actually over, they're too ripe and they had busted. I didn't realize these were ripening down here, but I got a few that are good. Large barred boar was my first ripe tomato of all this year, and it looks like, I hadn't been checking over on this side because I planted them so much later. The last time I looked there wasn't anything even close. Those large barred boar are just quick to ripen. Oh, look at that. That's not even, that's not even a quarter of what I need to pick of the ripe cherries. Isn't this beautiful? This basket deserves a photo shoot. What do you think? I'm gonna have to hang on to it, keep it just so, until the light is good, and I'll bring my camera back out and photograph it. The garden is so wild. It's looking wilty right now because it is the heat of the day. So fruitful though. All right, let's take this other basket and go down to the high tunnel. Hey, Ezzie. Ezzie just walked up. What's up, man? Uh, not much. Did you just finish your workout? Yeah. Good job. Thank you. Love you, Mom. I love you. Maya has his little home gym set up that he's been lifting weights and stuff in, and Ezra decided to challenge himself. So he's lifting weights twice a week now, which is good. It's good for boys and girls. It's good for humans. Y'all, I'm sitting here looking at my little haul of homegrown tomatoes. I guess it's not such a little haul. I'm just thinking one of my great joys in life is homegrown tomatoes and how wonderful it is to have days where I'm overwhelmed by them. Hey, Maya. Look at my back seat. That's- That's not a spader. It is. I'm gonna make salsa. Hey, Wes. All right, let's go in here. How dreamy is this high tunnel? I love it so much. These plants started acting puny. They're actually looking okay now, so maybe it was just stress. I thought they were diseased. This is the carolina, and the fruit I was picking was looking like really mottled, but it looks pretty okay right now, I think. So with these, I want to give them more time, and since this is in the high tunnel, I can because they're not going to get rained on. So I can wait until they're actually really ripe enough to pick. Muddy pointed out, they noticed in my last video, that there is a pumpkin growing out of the gravel in the middle of my high tunnel, and they asked if I was gonna leave it. Who do you think you're talking to? Of course I'm gonna leave it. I've actually learned about myself in recent years. I guess I should say I've come to appreciate the fact that there really is a battle going on inside of me regularly. Like, when I see people's gardens, like Charles Dowding's garden, what a dream, right? Like, if you haven't watched Charles Dowding, what are you even doing? Like, he is- he is a garden magic man. Like, he is just amazing, and his gardens are pristine. They're beautiful, and there is a part of me that, like, wants to be that kind of person, that has that kind of garden. But like, I just can't- I can't pull up a volunteer plant to save my life. Like, when I see things trying to grow, I just get so curious. Even when things start going wrong, like, a lot of times I don't want to save them because I'm like, I want to see what's going to happen here. I just- and- and- and so I end up with this, like, crazy, kind of eclectic, honestly, kind of messy space. But it still feeds me, so I think it's fine, and I'm still getting baskets of tomatoes, which I think is fine. This is what I was talking about these were doing. See how, like, kind of motley this looks? It's usually a sign of sickness, but I think it was just stress, maybe? I don't know. I know my friend Rebecca Rhodes. I was up at her house a few weeks ago, and I was in her greenhouse, and I noticed she had a lot of these tomatoes started. And I was like, oh, you like these? And she has had great success with them, and I didn't even know that that was one that she grew. But I was like, I have a lot of these in my greenhouse, but I don't know that they're doing well. But weirdly, all the new growth looks really healthy, and it's- the fruit that's ripening now looks normal. So maybe they were just having- we did have some really hot days, so maybe they were just struggling with that? They're under the shade clock. That's the surprising to me. I don't know. I wasn't really anticipating a turnaround, but they're looking better. So this variety is a hybrid. It's like a streaky orange slicer. I'll have to look up the name and put it on the screen, because I don't remember what it is off the top of my head. But I ate one of the tomatoes the other day, and it was really nice. I specifically got this one because it was supposed to be good for greenhouse growing. And honestly, it has that same thing going on as the large barred boar. Like, it's got this metallic sheen to the stripes. So pretty. Every year during this time of year, I just feel like I should just go ahead and put my mattress on the kitchen floor, because I live there. I go from garden to kitchen pretty much every day. I spend a lot of time at least a few days a week preserving, and then of course also cooking meals. And as I'm pulling all these tomatoes in, I'm thinking of making salsa, and like trying to decide if I want to go ahead and start canning. I may go ahead and just start freezing them so that I can batch can them all at the end of the season, and it'll give me a better idea of what I've got. I don't know. These are called, it's K-A-K-A-O. Kakoa, Kakao. This is also a high tunnel hybrid that I got for using out here, and I grew these last year. They were super prolific. I started them later, and so these were the tomatoes I grew in the high tunnel for like end of fall tomatoes, and I will probably start some more seeds and keep these going, because they did well. I picked my last ones the day of our last frost. Really prolific. They're supposed to be kind of like pole ropes in that purpley reddish. Look at this. Loaded. I'm actually going to try to pick those from the other side, and down here on the end, I did some of my favorite heirlooms like this. It's my precious Dr. Richie. They're not producing quite as much, but we're starting to get some. That one's not ripe enough. I know I have some Abe Lincolns down here. I think I did do a pole ropes in. I think that's what this is right here. Look at these big dudes. So much to look forward to. All right, I'm gonna go get the ones I couldn't get from the inside. Whoa. That's nice. Y'all, this is my favorite shirt. I bought it at Walmart so many years ago, and being my favorite shirt. It's just, it's so comfy. I just love it. It's so thin, and you know, sometimes you have a shirt that you, once you've broke it in real good, it just is exactly right, and that's how I feel about this shirt. So I wear it a lot. You've probably seen it before. I mean, it's, I notice because I'll like go through my thumbnails and be like, I wear that shirt all the time because my favorite's so comfy. Anyway, I just had a memory come up yesterday in my like phone or something, and it was, it was me in this shirt and had a shirt full of peaches, and I remember another picture that I remember where I'm wearing this shirt, and I've got a shirt full of peppers, and I'm sitting here filling my shirt with tomatoes to bring back to the basket, and I'm thinking, I wonder how many shirt fulls of all the things from my farm. I've had a shirt full of figs in this shirt, eggs, strawberries for sure, blackberries, and I just wonder how many yummy things this shirt has held, being that it probably gets worn more than any of the other ones I have. It's excellent capacity for holding produce, probably one of the reasons why it's my favorite. All right, let's take these back to the house. Here we go. I got my bathroom scale, which for stuff like this, I have to use my bathroom scale, like hold it, because my kitchen scale is not big enough. Okay, so this one is 28 pounds, this one is 32 pounds, and this one is 30 pounds, and then the cherries are 10 pounds, 11 pounds. 101 pounds, is that right? Over 100 pounds of tomatoes. It's wild. That is definitely wild, and there's still so many more out there that are going to come right, and a lot more cherry tomatoes. I'm going to get help from the kids for picking those, because there's a bunch of them. I am, I'm going to make a couple of batches of salsa out of this, but what I'm going to do with a lot of these, is I get these gallon size Ziploc bags, and I'm going to do this right away, because some of these split, and even if you leave them out for a day on your counter, you're going to end up with gnats. The tomatoes get bad quick, so if you, if you pull a tomato off and damage it, it really is fine if you're going to do something with it right away, but you can't let it sit out, but all I do is I cut the core out, which is larger on some tomatoes than others. These carbons are nice, they don't have really big cores, so just cut that out. I've got a chicken bucket right here, and then just score the bottom with an X, and then this goes in a bag, and if you want, you can sort your colors together, depending on what you're going to do with it. I just put them all together, and once these are frozen, obviously they keep in the freezer, they are going to take up a lot of space, so this isn't a long-term solution, but it is a solution on a day that you may harvest 100 pounds of tomatoes, and some of them are splitting or whatever, and you need to get them sorted right away. Like, if I don't have time to make salsa or can or anything like that, I can do this, and that way I can stay on top of my harvesting and not get overwhelmed by it. I actually have a couple of bags of tomatoes in my freezer from last summer that have been waiting to make a farmer's table video. I saved them to make a farmer's table video like when tomato season came back around, so I'm gonna make a video showing how to do this, but I'll tell you here, um, once you freeze these, you can take them out, just put them in your sink and let them thaw, and obviously it's going to take several hours. Once they've thawed, these skins slip right off, because you've cut the core out, you've cut, you've X'd the bottom. If they have any, like, yucky spots, go ahead and cut those off so they're dealt with ahead of time, but once they're thawed, they are going to be really collapsed when you freeze a plant or any part of a plant. The cellular walls typically burst. That's why frost kills our frost tender plants. Um, so they're gonna be kind of mushy, but not any worse than, like, what a processed jar of tomatoes would be. You could easily slip the skins off. You can drain off a little bit of the liquid if you want, and then I like to just dump a whole bunch of bags into, like, a big roaster to make a big batch of, like, spaghetti sauce and then can that, or I'll just get out one bag, two bags at a time, and just make the pot of sauce that I need for that night's dinner. So this is what I'm going to be doing with a lot of these tomatoes, because I do have, I'm going to have to do another big harvest, maybe, and, like, with how those tomatoes look. It really depends on what the weather does. Maybe, like, four or five days, I'll have another big harvest. Probably not quite this big, but at least probably two of these baskets full, and then it's going to keep coming, but I've got enough cilantro to do a few batches of salsa, and once I do that, the rest of these are going to go in the freezer, and a few of them that were, like, kind of on the edge of not quite being ripe enough, I'll set those on the counter until they ripen. Yeah, this is a, this is an excellent problem to have. It's tomato season, guys. I know for some of you it's not yet. I'll eat one on your behalf. Thank you for hanging out with me today. I bless you. Until next time.