After a bout of illness, I felt well enough on July 11 to go
to the garden and harvest. First, I cleaned up with the weed-eater – the garden
is clean and mostly in good shape.
Which is a big accomplishment given the number of plants (~90) and
compared to previous years. Next,
I collected samples of F2 fruit in paper bags labeled with plant numbers. (More on phenotypes later.) Then, I
picked the remainder of ripe F2 fruit en masse. That resulted in 2 baskets of F2 fruit, and finally I picked
a basket or so of heirlooms.
Then, on Sat. July 16 – only 5 days later – I went back and
picked what may be the biggest harvest I’ve ever had. 1 basket of more F2s; 1 basket full of orange slicers and
green zebras – with some really huge OS’s; 1 basket full of Cherokee Purple;
and another basket of “reds” – mostly Mortgage Lifters, Romas, and a few odd SS
and Long Toms. The latter are not
very productive, as they seemed pretty susceptible to end rot. So in all, that was 4 full baskets. Probably on the order of 40
pounds.
I managed to do a lot of sauce prep/processing early in the
week and this past weekend.
I actually bothered to skin most of these except for the first batch of
“F2 puree” from 2 baskets’ worth.
Then, they were pureed and frozen in bags. Looks like I got about 10 freezer bags each with 2-3 quarts
of puree. These are separated by
type: pure F2s, “mostly CP”, and
“mostly ML+Romas”. I also froze a
bag of F2 #28 cherry-size tomatoes – because I picked about 1-2 quarts of these
but every darn last one was split wide open. Though this looked like a nice cherry tomato, if it always
splits like this it will be a real loser. But, the splitting might just be due to the wet
weather we’ve had – true thunderstorms almost every week without fail.
