The tomato wars are over; the last red tide flowed to the door on Saturday. Fortunately Mr HG had hidden some of the crates still waiting consumption or bottling, as we were all out and failure to keep up with the flow would have been discovered. It was still a shocking sight to see them glowing with the promise of yet more work, (rather than glowing with promise of winter pastas cheered by summer plenty) but this lot really are it. Production norms have been over-fulfilled; there's going to have to be some better planning next year - like NO TOMATO OUTPUT.
The attempt to dry them - sun dried tomatoes so expensive in Waitrose should have been a free lunch - came to a sticky end. After all we had sun burning the skin off our backs and we had the beastly tomatoes. Admittedly just leaving them in the sun was more in hope and exhaustion than the application of scientific method, but I don't think the wasps were deserved for failure to find out how it's done. I can state how it's not done, anyway, now. Don't leave them in serried ranks in the sun and hope for the best. Nothing agricultural ever is that obvious. I expect they have to be dropped in boiling oil, fished out with the bare hands, skinned with a special skinning knife (the tomatoes not the hands) only available at feast day markets, threaded on a special, unidentifieable piece of vegetation like the inner stalk of the corn on the cob, blessed, and hung up somewhere inaccessible with special linen cloths to catch any drips.
The next inundation will be rape. Not the Sabine women variety, the nasty green and yellow cattle food that is regarded as fit for humans here. I've taken an executive decision to cart it down to the village garden and put it straight into the compost without the intervening stages of washing it, boiling it, and freezing it.
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4 comments:
I love you sun drying technique :-) We got a total of 3 tomatoes this year. They were delicious.
So did the wasps, L.
If you cut the toms in half lengthways and cover with cheese cloth just a little raised with a couple of sticks they will be protected from the bugs and it also provides ventilation. This process should take anything from 2 to 7 days but you must bring them in at night. You can cheat by putting them in a very, very low gas oven for about six hours or until they resemble the ones you see in the deli. AA
The rest of those on our three plants succumbed to the blight. All the rain I gather. Carrots still doing fine - we planted those in a huge pot. Some 6 months ago, we were told that we were now 40th in line for an allotment; when we applied we were 50th. We applied two years ago.
Ergo, we are looking at another 6 years before we get one. Apparently our town has only half the allotment per capita rate it should have, but the council can do nothing about it.
This the same council that plastered the whole are with dog poo fine stickers, yet did not put up a single extra dog poo bin.
You know it makes sense.
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