What a beautiful picture to see in the middle of January!

*sigh*

Diane

I plan on putting out about 10 of these, this year. We'll try dehydrating some. But most of all, I enjoyed eating it as if it really was a cherry!.

George
Tahlequah, OK

What a gorgeous plant! If that doesn't make us start longing for spring, nothing will.

George, I love the black cherries, as you know. I eat so many in the garden that it's a wonder I ever manage to dehydrate any for winter. After I take a batch of dried tomatoes out of the oven to cool, I tend to eat some more of them right then and there. Somehow I manage to fill up a lot of quart bags even though I probably eat as many of the freshly-dehydrated ones as I put away for winter.

This week, I've been eating mixed dehydrated cherry tomatoes. (Sometimes I'll dehydrate only one variety at a time if it was a big harvest and other times I mix them togther.) The batch we've been eating this week has mostly Black Cherry and SunGold, but also some Ildi, Sweet Million and Rose Quartz too.

This morning I ate a whole coffee cup full of rehydrated tomatoes. Yummy.

Dawn

Glenda, I would just love it if my tomato plants looked like that, but they never do. Dawn talks about how many Black Cherry tomatoes she gets and I just enjoy the few that mine produce. Somehow last year I didn't even get a Black Cherry in the ground, but I had a lot of cherry tomatoes because I planted Sungold.

You must have really good soil. What did you put in that tomato hole? Share the wealth, please. Carol

Carol, I had to stop and think which gate and what side....it is inside the garden and guess what? That is right at the edge of the compost pile.

I have about 30 feet of fencing on the east side of the gate and we compost by tossing over the fence all kitchen waste...once in a great while, I get embarrassed at how it looks and I shovel dirt over the whole thing.

I am blessed with good garden soil. The previous owners had lived here for 50 years. They were traditional gardeners and farmers and she spread triple 13 field fertilizer on every spring when her husband fertilized the hay fields. As a result, when the ground dried out after a rain, it cracked open like the Sahara Desert! I almost cried when I saw it. There were no earthworms at all.My previous garden was to the point, I could dig in it with my hands. I drove my husband crazy complaining about the garden spot here. There has been zero fertilizer applied since 1993. Each year I mulch and let that decompose and lots of that has been old alfalfa hay. That is about it. I still want more humus in the soil so still add all manner of compostables every year. I also add kitchen waste directly under the mulch next to 'needy' plants.

I did start a Bayer fertilizer program on some roses which looked so sorry last year, but I am not good about routine so that probably won't happen this year.

If you grow this in a row, George, you will have a living privacy fence. I don't see how you could do a pot unless you had a giant cage around it. I don't think it lends itself to tying up!

I love Sungold and will be planting it again this year (thanks to Helen).

Now I need a dehydrator. Still on my list because of you enablers: Nutri-grain mill, a Victorio (or other brand) food strainer . I bought the vacuum sealer this fall.

Glenda,

We all enable one another. I've got the vacuum sealer and the Victorio, but I do have the Nutri-grain Mill on my list. I had a small dehydrator and then we bought a stove that had a convection oven, and only while we were driving home with the stove in the back of the truck did I learn while reading the manual that the convection oven had a 'Dehydrate" feature. How lucky was that?

I think that a big long row of tomatoes would make a great privacy fence, but then I am tomato-obsessed.

I think that no matter what the problem with any given soil is, compost is the answer. I always mulch with hay, straw and grass clippings and am amazed at how much they improve the soil as they break down. My dad had a traditional compost pile in the corner of the yard for his garden and my grandfather essentially sheet-composted by throwing his compost pile ingredients directly into the pathways of his garden and turning them under with a shovel. Both those ways are a lot more work than just mulching the beds and letting the mulch feed the soil as
it breaks down.

I think you could grow black cherry in a "pot" as long as that pot was one of those big old metal stock tanks that holds 100 or 150 gallons of water, or in this case soil. That would elevate the plant a couple of feet higher though, so you'd need a ladder to pick those beautiful Black Cherry tomatoes.

I have a big old stock tank.....now I am giving myself ideas.

Dawn

You know, up until I saw this pic, I had my gardening fever under control, at a nice slow simmer. Every time I come back and look at it, it turns up the flame one notch higher.

I can feel the blaze erupting!!! Holy cow, it will be hard to hold myself back until next month! I have other things to finish before I can start getting dirty.

Diane

OMG!

Diane, I completely agree!! I had my gardening obsession under control. Now I can't hardly wait for spring and summer. I can just taste the tomatoes.

I just got some more black cherry tomato seeds today along with some others like Arkansas Traveler and Romeo Roma's. Now that the snow is gone, my wheels are turning again!! I'm just waiting for it to dry up a bit so I can work on my gardening areas.

Dawn, I've never ate dehydrated tomatoes before. I just might have to try them this year. They sound pretty good. I bet they would be great in some of my italian casseroles! You'll have to let me know how you dehydrate yours.

Me too. I have visions of seed packets and seed flats dancing in my head. Yesterday we had some sunshine and it was easy to think spring was closer than it is. Today it has been gray and overcast with a misty, drizzly bit of something falling every now and then, so it is a bit easier to remind myself it is still winter. Everyone who's wanting to jump the gun and start some seeds now, repeat after me...it is still winter, it is still winter, it is still winter.

There are several ways to dehydrate tomatoes. I generally do it the simple way. I start picking whichever bite-sized tomatoes are fully ripe. I try to put at least 1 tomato in the bucket for each 1 I put into my mouth. I take the survivors (those are the ones I didn't eat or the ones I didn't drop on the ground and then step on) inside, wash them, drain them and let them drip dry in the colander. I slice them in half, but leave the two halves just barely attached to one another so I can handle two halves at one time when transferring them from the cutting board to the cookie sheet. I line them all up nice and neat, close but not touching (well, the two halves of each tomato touch because they are still attached but they don't touch anything else) on cookie sheets. I place the cut-side up and the skin side down so they'll dry more quickly. My oven has three racks so I generally dry 3 cookie sheets of tomatoes at one time. In general, I'm not an overly "neat" or fussy person, but all my tomato rows on the cookie sheets have to be lined up nice and neat and 'just so'. Why? Just because.

I turn on the oven, choose the 'dehydrate' feature and choose my temperature from the available dehyrating options. I get busy doing other stuff and forget about them for a while. Eventually the whole house is scented with the most delicious aroma. Anyone who comes to the house while I'm dehydrating tomatoes doesn't want to leave. They just want to sit there and inhale that fragrant tomatoey aroma.

When the tomatoes have been in about one-half as long as I think they'll take to dehydrate (based on prior experience), I start checking them every 30 or 45 minutes. When they have dried down to the right moisture level, I remove them from the dehydrator and let them cool on the cookie sheets.

Once they are cool, I put them into quart sized freezer zip-lock bags. I put the quart-sized freezer bags into 1-gallon or 2-gallon freezer bagas, so that I don't have to carry a lot of quart bags to the freezer or deal with them loose in the freezer. I just add more quart bags to a bigger bag in the freezer until the larger zip-lock is full.

In a good year, as a minimum I'll put several thousand bite-sized tomatoes into the freezer. In the "off season", I eat them many different ways. Sometimes I eat them in their dried state....just like eating raisins, only their color is prettier (oranges, reds, pinks, yellows instead of brown or golden raisins). I might eat handfuls of them as a snack, or just a handful tossed into a salad. Sometimes I'll put them in a cup or bowl, add water and rehydrate them. Then, we can toss them into a salad or eat as snacks or as a side dish on a plate. Sometimes I'll toss a handful of them into a soup, casserole or even into salsa to make it more "tomatoey".

If I am careful and ration them out, I won't run out until maybe March.

You can get fancy and marinate them in red wine or some other agent that will give them a good flavor, but the tradeoff is that they are absorbing moisture as they marinate and will take longer to dehydrate. You can drizzle them with extra-virgin olive oil and sprinkle herbs or a little salt on them before you dehydrate them. The ones brushed with olive oil will take a long time to dry.

If you dehydrate them down to a low-enough moisture level, you can store them in a cool, dark place like a closet or pantry and not keep them in the freezer. I prefer the freezer though as extra insurance.

Since different sizes of tomatoes dry more quickly or more slowly than the others, I try to segregate my tomatoes by size and dry only similarly-sized ones on each cookie sheet. Usually, I'll have one cookie sheet of black cherries, one of the rest of the 'average' sized ones, and one that has only the tiny currant sized ones (they dry really fast and have to come out of the oven much sooner than the others).

In a pinch, when the harvest is very heavy, I can put two cookie sheets on each rack if I turn them lengthwise facing the door. I don't really like drying six trays of tomatoes at once, but it can be done.

The only really stringent rule I have is that I absolutely, positively cannot eat more than half a batch of dehydrated tomatoes while they are cooling. This can be a very hard rule to enforce.

So, if I pick 1,000 bite-sized tomatoes in the garden and eat 500 of them while I'm picking, and then I eat 250 of the dried ones while they're cooling and being transferred to freezer bags for storage....then I'll get 250 dried tomatoes from a picking of 1,000. (And Tim wonders where all those little tomatoes go all summer long! If he'd watch me work, he'd know where they are going.)

Actually, I often show a lot of restraint and barely eat any of the dried ones the minute they come out of the oven. You believe that, right?

Dawn, We've told you a million times not to exagerate. LOL

I took a look at all your pics and your quite the gardener.
Everything looks so good and green. It's very nice of you to remind us what we have to look forward to in just a few months. Thank you!

Teresa

"If you grow this in a row, George, you will have a living privacy fence." - Precisely. I'm thinking of doing a row along the chain link fence in our front yard. It will block the view, from the road, of what else we have. And, if a passerby wants to pick a few, well, that's okay!

George

it is still winter, it is still winter, it is still winter...*sigh*

Beauty plant, Glenda! I can't wait to try growing mine this year now! I'm going to do a wall of them too... lol!

I've got to start SOMETHING soon! My rosemary rooted nicely, now I'm eyeing my herb seeds...

Beth

I HAVE to stop coming back to this thread.

Diane