Did anyone else get caught off guard by the early frosts? I know I did! The pains of working a regular job at 50+ hours a week doesn’t always lend well to tending the garden when it needs to be. But, that’s a story for another day. I’ll be honest, my garden got away from me this year. Like many of you… I tried to balance growing a garden while juggling a full-time job, raising farm boys, volunteering in the community and keeping the farm and house afloat! Don’t get me wrong, I loved every minute of it. Just a few things slipped to the sidelines. One of those were my tomatoes…. Unfortunately.
But…. All was not lost! Under the light of a full moon, I ran outside with 5-gallon buckets and started pulling off any and all tomatoes that were ready to be harvested. I even gathered some green-pinkish ones in an effort to ripen them in the house. To make my harvesting even quicker…. I just cut off full vines and placed them in the buckets. Definitely a time saver, especially when the frost settling on my garden with each passing second.
It was a good growing season here…. Hot, lots of moisture, and even though my tomatoes were transplanted super late… they took off like gang busters. So much so, that they grew over 6 feet tall and busted out of my cages. Needless to say, I will be designing new tomato cages for next year and try my hand at trellising too. I had so many tomatoes, I didn’t know what to do… and I was running out of time with the frost coming so early….
What to do? What to do? I didn’t want to lose my harvest…. I didn’t want the tomatoes to spoil on the vine, but I didn’t have time to devote a whole day, or two, to processing that many tomatoes. I had grand plans to make homemade spaghetti sauce, chili sauce, taco sauce and yes, I was even going to try and make homemade ketchup and barbeque sauce…. Since those two items are used like water around our house. But alas, the best laid plans went asunder… and here I was scrambling at the 11th hour trying to salvage my tomatoes before they become nothing but compost or wildlife fodder.
I did the one thing I could think of and I’m so glad I did. All I did was wash my tomatoes, removed any bad spots and quartered the tomatoes. I placed the clean, blemish free tomatoes in freezer gallon bags, sucked as much air out of the bags as possible and placed them in the freezer. In total, I was able to process all my tomatoes in a matter of one hour! I was so relieved when I had gotten everything tucked away in the freezer for a cold winter’s day when I would have time to create the food masterpieces that I so desperately wanted to try. Now, I’ll have time to make my taco sauce, salsa, chili and even try my hand at making ketchup and barbeque sauce when I have more time to devote to these adventures. And the best part, the tomatoes will already be prepped and ready to go.
From previous experience, I’ve found that by preserving the tomatoes this way, it cuts a lot of my processing time for when I’m making other dishes. I just pull out the number of tomatoes I want… let them thaw slightly on the counter and the skins just slide off. This saves a lot of time and prep work. And since the tomatoes don’t need to hold their shape for my sauces… even better! Love it when I can save time with my harvest and recipes. Now, once I get to cooking, I’ll share my recipes (triumphs and failures) with using tomatoes that have been preserving whole by freezing. But in the meantime, give whole tomato freezing a try…. You won’t be disappointed!