Isn't it exciting! Great pics. You have certainly made the most of your space. I can't get over that tomato plant, excuse me, I should have said that tomato tree. Enjoy your harvest!

Kathy, Just like Bluebell Ice Cream always says "We eat all we can and sell the rest...." No, just kidding, we don't actually sell any. LOL We absolutely eat all we can. The first few ripe tomatoes always go into bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches, which is ALL we eat in spring when the first tomatoes are available. Then, after we calm down from the excitement of having tomatoes, we began to eat them in salads, sliced, or even held in our hands and eaten the same way you'd eat a fresh peach. When the tomatoes start getting ripe, that's about all I eat--tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. Here's a typical "tomato day" early in the season when the tomatoes are ripening: I'll chop them up and stir them into an omelet (along with garden-fresh green onions and mini bell peppers) for breakfast, eat handfuls of little ones while working in the garden, and then come inside for lunch. Lunch will be a BLT (turkey bacon most of the time, but really good, high-quality "real"bacon for the first few) or even fried green tomato BLTs with cilantro mayo. Then, if I work outside in the garden in the afternoon, you know I'm going to eat several handfuls of cherry types like Black Cherry, Sungold, Tess's Land Race Currant, etc. Dinner? At the very least, it will include a salad with fresh tomatoes. Maybe a sauce if there's that many ripe or tomato-onion pie, or salsa, etc. When tomatoes are in season, we can't get enough of them. I also like to make gazpacho, a tomato-based chicken tortilla soup, taco soup or tomato-basil soup. I also dehydrate larger ones, but cut them into quarters or even eighths so they dry more quickly. I used to give a whole lot away, but now I put up more for winter and give fewer away. You can even freeze them whole. Just pop them into a freezer bag and freeze them after you've washed them and let them dry. In the winter, you can take them out of the freezer and use them in sauces or soups. I love to make sauce from a combination of different kinds. The best tomato sauces I've ever made have been a combination of many kinds of heirloom tomatoes--not all paste ones. The blacks and the Brandywine types, in particular, makes the most amazing sauces and salsas. For drying, you can use a small food dehydrator (Wal-Mart usually has the round ones with several trays), a large and fancy dehydrator like an Excaliber (sp?) or even an oven. You can dry them in a regular oven by slicing the cherry, pear, and currant tomatoes in half and placing them skin down/cut side facing upward on baking sheets, setting the oven on its lowest setting "warm", and 'baking' them until they are sufficiently dry. If you have a convection oven, you can use the convection oven to dry them even more quickly. My stove (which certainly is smarter than I am and has feature I've never even tried to use) has a "Dehydrate" feature meant to be used with the convection oven. I just love it. I can dry six cookie sheets of tomatoes at one time, and the house smells heavenly when they are drying. I feel like I've died and gone to tomato heaven when the house smells like that! I dry thousands of small tomatoes every year, pack them into zip-lock bags and put them in the freezer. During the "off-season", I pull out a bag and eat them. You can eat them dry--they resemble raisins except with intense tomato flavor--or you can rehydrate them in a bowl of water for a couple of hours. Or, you can use them in any recipe that calls for sun-dried tomatoes. I like them any way at all. In an exceptionally rainy year, the excess rain "waters down" the flavor of tomatoes and almost ruins them because it makes them so bland. (People who over-water and over-fertilize often "ruin" their tomtoes in the same way.) In a year like that, you can "salvage" your crop, though, by either dehydrating them, which removes the excess moisture and intensifies the flavor, or by cooking them down into sauce, which does the same thing. I have recipes to prepare tomatoes many different ways and I'll share some of them with you as the tomatoes ripen. I even have recipes for tomato pie and tomato cake! (Tomatoes are VERY versatile.) Here's how I use them: Cherry, Grape, Currant types: eat by the handful all day long straight off the vines while working in the garden. If you don't spray with chemicals, you can do this. If you spray your plants with Daconil (chlorothalonil) or any other chemical sprays (whether natural or chemical in nature), you obviously have to wash the fruit first. We eat them in salads daily, dehydrate them for the winter months, etc. If you raise Principe' Borghese, you can pull it up by the roots and air-dry it by hanging it upside down in a dry basement, attic, cellar, etc. but you can't really "sun-dry" them here in OK the way they do in Italy because we have too much humidity. Well, people in SW OK might be able to sun-dry, but I can't even do it here in southcentral OK except in the hottest, driest droughts when humidity is insanely low. With the paste tomatoes, we use them for salsa. You have to have several paste tomato plants to get enough ripe ones at one time for tomato sauce. It takes a LOT of tomatoes to make a pot of pasta sauce. Remember that tomatoes are largely water and most of that water boils away so what seems like a "lot" of tomatoes cooks down over the hours into a relatively small amount of sauce. So, most of the paste tomatoes we raise are used for salsa or pico de gallo. Yellow pear and other similar yellow tomatoes make wonderful tomato marmalade or tomato preserves, but you can only make small batches of a few jars unless you have multiple plants. When you start getting lots of tomatoes, you can use them so many ways......one of my favorite is a tomato-onion pie that is sort of like a quiche. They make great, fairly quick pizza sauce and then you can make pizza using home-made crust or Boboli crusts. If I want to make a pizza or pasta sauce for dinner, I fill up a crockpot with tomatoes in the morning after breakfast, set it on low and let them cook down all day. Sometimes I remove the lid so more moisture cooks off more quickly. Then, when I come in at 3 or 4, I transfer them to a pot on the stove, boil them down as needed, and add the remaining ingredients, simmering the sauce for an hour or two for dinner at 5 or 6 p.m. Kathy, there are so many ways to prepare them! Sometimes, I think people get "bogged down" or "stuck" eating them fresh and forget how versatile they are. Maybe we can start a "favorite tomato recipe" thread in a few weeks and just keep adding to it and adding to it. One plant of each variety is fine, unless you want more. If I am planning on making and canning a LOT of sauce, I plant a couple of dozen paste tomatoes--they grow very well in buckets. You don't have room for that many, and I can't can as much as I used to because my new stove, purchased last summer, has a ceramic top and canning is not recomended. The old stove is in the garage, though, and I can plug it in and use it for canning because it was the oven that went out on it, not the burners. (For some reason, DH really wanted a "new" stove, although I would have been happy fixing the old one's oven.) Tomato plants are self-fertile, so they pollinate and fertilize themselves via air movement, so only one type of each is needed. Of course, as space allows you can add more. If you want to save seed AND you want to avoid the possibility of having insects like small bees and flies cause cross-pollination, you have to bag your blossoms even before they open. For blossom bagging, just go to the wedding part of the craft section at your local Wal-Mart (tee hee) and buy a set of the litle bags sold there for rice or whatever. I think one package has ten bags? After the fruit form, you can remove the bags and re-use them, but be sure to mark that branch so you know to save seeds from that cluster of tomatoes. I usually use surveyor's tape as a marker when I bag blossoms, but I don't do it all that often because I'm so busy during the garden season that I don't save a lot of seeds. I hope I answered your questions. If I didn't, ask more or ask again. And, if you want to see which tomatoes are "in favor" this year, watch when I type up the list of what actually went into the ground. I often plant two of each variety, but then maybe 4 of a few of the ones we really adore. Well, except for Tess's Land Race Currant. It gets so huge that one is all you need and, even at that, I leave hundreds and hundreds of them on the plant for the birds because I get tired of picking the thousands of tiny tomatoes that one plant makes over the course of the growing season. In the "old days" they used to plant hollyhocks to "hide" the outhouse from view. Well, if I had an outhouse, I'd just plant one Tess's Land Race Currant and it would hide it from view all by itself! Happy tomato growing and eating! Now that I have tomatoes on the brain, I'm going to go take a bag out of the freezer now to rehydrate for lunch. Dawn

Thanks sinfonian! I KNOW Its big. I KNOW its wide. But like I said, until I had it filled and was putting my twine grid up I didn't even realize that it was 5x10 instead of 4x8. I yelled at my husband for not telling me when he cut the one board in half for me LOL. But its done, it is what it is this year. There is NO way I'm tearing it down and starting it over. I planted my strawberries yesterday afternoon. Although they looked kind of sad, so it'll be interesting to see what grows and doesn't grow. I have not planted my pickling cucs, nor tomatoes, nor peas yet. Those were started in separate containers. The beans are bush beans so from the reading I did they won't need anything to climb. I will put something in for the peas to climb though, and tomatoes too. Thats why I spread them out so that I can still get in and to other stuff. So much to learn! I'll be happy if ANYTHING grows this year LOL. Even one plant ;)

I am thinking we should explore the tomato in theatre as "WOW! What a tomato." Or the "Joy Of Tomatoes" such as throwing overripe ones at bad actors. Is it a berry or a fruit or a vegetable? No matter, how is it used? I'll just let you be the judge, it's simply complicated. I am thinking that with a little sugar and pectin one could make tomato jelly. And lastly, referring to an earlier post - I do not steal, I borrow.