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#1152

What To Do With All These Tomatoes – EP 1152

Today, I want to talk to you about navigating homestead abundance when it feels like everything is happening at once: planting for fall, processing an abundant tomato harvest, livestock needing extra support in the heat, and personal things ramping up in the background. But mostly, today is about 120 pounds of tomatoes that appeared here yesterday during a week when I won’t be around. We will also cover our usual Tuesday segments.

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Tales From The Prepper Pantry

  • 120 Pounds of Tomatoes

  • Peaches: Final Harvest

  • ¼ bushel of green beans off 5 plants

  • Time to plant the fall garden if you have not – for real, it is time!

  • Moving from paper goods to washables where it makes sense

Frugality Tip

  • Say yes, but lean on community

Operation Independence

  • Seeking Farm Sponsors for our Farm To Table Dinner in September – how that works.

Tomatoes All At Once

  • Geraldines Story from A is For Cod-Wada: https://www.amazon.com/coda-wada-Geraldine-Duncann/dp/B0006YH9M2

  • THE MOMENT EVERY HOMESTEADER WAITS FOR: Michelle from Trippy Acres has too many tomatoes this is the day EVERY homesteader waits for – the moment someone says, can you take all this (WHATEVER) off my hands – and that whatever is a thing you love.

    • Adjusted Monday schedule to harvest

    • Admitted I wasnt processing last night to maintain health, but kept them all cool where? In my livingroom on a fold out table

    • Processed them today – 120 pounds or so of tomatoes.

  • A FAMILIAR RHYTHM: SORT – CUT – FREEZE – REPEAT

    • GOAL is not homestead processing perfection, it is food spoilage stabilization.

      • Works well post freezer: canned sauce, ketchup, salsa, stewed, freeze dried

      • Must happen from fresh: Sundried, fresh

    • Partial processing now helps future winter canning flow well

      • Core and cut smaller to make it easier to process later as sauce

      • Skins come off easily after freezing for stewed but before thawing, so store tomatoes you plan to skin as a single layer and only cored, not sliced smaller

      • Dice the tomatoes you want for salsa in salsa batch sizes so that you can pull tomatoes for salsa straight from the freezer into the salsa pot

      • Reducing sauce without heat by freezing and canned tomato water

    • Keep Heat Outside

      • Dehydrate and crockpot reduce sauces outside under cover (assuming you don’t have a bear problem) to save adding heat inside

      • Freezing for winter canning lets you heat the house int he winter while processing your tomatoes – win-win

    • Prioritize ripest tomatoes first and set aside underripe ones to ripen as you go

  • Favorite Tomato recipes

    • Canned Salsa (Scaled for how many peppers I have)

    • Fresh tomato Basil Soup (Make it and freeze for winter)

    • Tomato Cucumber Salad

    • Fresh Tomato and Meat Sauce

    • Sliced Tomato with, salt and pepper, basil and a balsamic reduction

    • Dried tomato in olive oil and garlic

    • Freeze dried tomato powder

    • Canned tomato sauce

    • Canned stewed tomatoes if I am in a hurry

    • Tomato cheese fry pies

One of the things that can be hard to communicate to people about living a homesteaders lifestyle is that you will have times where everything seems to be happening at once.

Like for me right now: I need to be in Nashville for a few days managing my rental property, my mobility is coming back so I am working on a backlog from my injury and also setting a foundation for a fall garden, the livestock does best when they are handled daily even though they can sort of go on auto pilot. We just finished a large peach harvest, there are saturday farmers markets to do, our events are happing every other week or so, and then, 120 pounds of tomatoes appeared.

You build the skills over years on a homestead to tap into something like this and run with it.

I used to drop everything for days to do projects like this and that is how I learned a better way. One that preserves the food while preserving the reason I am on the homestead: to live in concert with nature, build abundance from the land, and enjoy the beauty of this place.

So if you are new to homesteading, it may feel like lots of pressure at this time of year with the pest pressure, the weeds and the harvest, but it doesn’t have to be. And being frantic all the time isn’t why you are doing this, is it? Make It A Great Week