Yesterday we finished the last fresh tomatoes of this year’s crop, chopped fine in a pot of garlicky chicken soup. We’re all a bit under the weather, and that chicken soup was wonderful!
All the rest of the tomatoes, and there weren’t that many this year, are either frozen or made up into salsa. It seems funny, in the middle of November, to have no more trays of ripening tomatoes on our windowsills and elsewhere. In the past I’ve collected salad tomatoes from our furnace room almost up to Christmas!
Our tomatoes had a disease this year and many spoiled, even while still in the garden. We’ve been very careful to put all diseased tomato scraps into the garbage, not the compost pile. We’ve also raked up all the plants themselves for the garbage. I hope this will prevent the disease, whatever it was, from spreading.
Since we’re always careful to rotate our garden, there should be no difficulty with this tomato disease next year. Just to be sure, we’ll be planting only disease-resistant varieties next year instead of a mix of heritage tomatoes and our own saved seeds.
I can hardly believe I’m thinking about next year’s planting already!
Thanks for stopping by for Tea Time with Annie Kate.
It was a bad year for tomatoe wilt…many of the stores in our area were pulling all plants early in the spring due to the disease. Peppers also carry the same disease. It is best to put new soil down where you had your diseased plants and plant a cover crop such as winter grass to plow under as green fertilizer to help leach the soil of the disease. http://gardening.about.com/od/vegetablepatch/a/TomatoProblems.htm
So do you have a favorite from scratch salsa recipe to share?!
Thank you so much for that link! I don't think this was wilt, because the leaves didn't go black, but I'll be looking up what it was.
And, yes, I do have a salsa recipe, and I'll maybe post it sometime soon. 🙂
Annie Kate