Final Fall Harvest

Wow, lucky you! You get TWO blog posts from me in a single day - impressive! Actually, I'm so overrun with photos and ideas for new posts that I need to clean out both my mental and digital archives before I get started with posting all the goodies that we're working on for our homemade holiday season. Lots of fun things in the works...stay tuned!

Yesterday we harvested all the rest of our tomatoes, and the boys had a blast picking them, sorting them by color and then throwing out (yes, I mean literally throwing them into the garbage can!) the cracked or bug eaten ones. We only planted three tomato plants this year, but boy oh boy were the tomatoes abundant! We grew Better Boy, Amish Paste and Health Kick varieties, and they all did extremely well. Since we don't really care for raw tomatoes around here (I know, I know, how weird is it to grow a vegetable that you don't even like?) I was especially fond of the Amish Paste because it was perfect for pasta sauce, and the Health Kick mixed with the Better Boy made for some kick-a$$ salsa.


It was like "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" out there!


We picked all of the remaining tomatoes and put them into a paper towel lined cardboard box so that the mature green tomatoes will be able to ripen in our garage over the next couple of weeks.


The boys were SUCH great helpers, and they both worked incredibly hard stipping vines and tossing the rest into the green waste. Sutton and Sawyer both wanted to pick all the remaining red tomatoes, but Sutton wasn't exactly gentle enough when it came to putting the ripe ones into the box. "Gently, gently, please. Sutton, please don't throw the tomatoes into the box. Sutton, please? Sutton...NO THROWING TOMATOES!" was pretty much the repeated dialogue of the day.

Eventually the boys reached an agreement and sealed it with a pinky promise - Sutton got to pick all the green ones since there were a lot more of them, and Sawyer got the red ones because they were "prettier." What that meant for me was that lots of teensy weensy green ones made it into the box, but he was so proud of his work that I didn't want to discourage him :)

The final haul.

Maybe I'll even get inspired to blog about how I turn those into this:

The best pasta sauce. Ever.