Ripe Tomatoes!

Today was Tuesday and this is my first "Tomato Tuesday" post!

The harvest of the first truly ripe tomatoes are always an exciting time around our homestead! Lisa especially loves them, so she was very pleased to find many ripe tomatoes in the garden this afternoon. They are rather late, due to the fact that we had all that record rain in May and she could not find a dry time to put the plants out in the garden. But better later in the season than never! Neighbors have complained about their tomatoes rotting on the vine this year before they ripened, but not ours!

Here is what some of the plants looked like almost 3 weeks ago when they were smaller.



And here again a couple weeks earlier:



I used these pictures so you could see the tomato cages we used. I made them last year out of cattle fence by simply cutting up a roll of fence and then twisting the ends together to make a circle. The ones that worked the best were those we cut the bottom line of fence off which left wire prongs that could be stuck into the ground. Some that we did not cut off the bottom fell over when the plants got too big and heavy so we had to put a stick inside the cage to keep it from falling over. If I took a picture now, you wouldn't even be able to see any of the cages because the plants have overgrown them!

The squares in the fence are small at the bottom and get larger as they go up, so there is plenty of room for the branches to come out, or to reach a hand in. Here you can see what the squares looked like about a month ago.



The cages are doing great keeping the tomatoes off the ground. We also used newspapers around the plants to keep the weeds under control, which also worked well!

The nicest looking ripe tomatoes that Lisa picked this afternoon were the Rutgers and Black Prince, both of which were grown from our own seed saved from last year! As a matter of fact, all of the tomatoes picked today are from seed from tomatoes grown last year.



The Rutgers, a canning tomato, are huge this year! Lisa is going to use some of these for sandwiches.




The Black Prince is a good meaty sauce tomato, and they are also bigger than they were last year!



The Romas and Mountain Pride gave us some nice tomatoes today as well. Here are some of the Romas, which are a great sauce tomato.



I didn't take any pictures of the Mountain Pride, even though I like their name the best. They look just like the Rutgers, except smaller. They are a canning or stewing tomato.

God is blessing!