My experience has been that they will eventually ripen if left on the counter. I'd probably leave some to do that but here is a Green Tomato Chutney recipe that is excellent, simple and versatile. I use it on grilled fish, but it would go with chicken or turkey or on a sandwich or whatever! 1/2 c packed light brown sugar 1/3 c cider vinegar 2 TBSP peeled and minced fresh ginger 2 TBSP minced shallot 1/8 to 1/4 dried hot red pepper flakes pinch kosher salt 2 1/2 pounds green tomatoes, seeded and chopped (about 2 cups) 1/4 cup chopped cilantro (I use less, but it's up to taste) 1. Bring sugar, vinegar, ginger, shallot, pepper flakes and salt to a boil over med. high heat. Reduce heat and simmer 5 min., until syrupy. 2. Add tomatoes and simmer, stirring, 15 min., or until most of the liquid has evaporated and tomatoes are soft. Remove from heat and stir in cilantro. Let cool. Serve at room temp or chilled. Good luck and enjoy those tomatoes! Justine

Well, I was going to make the tomato cake tomorrow to bring for cookout at my parents'. But while I was walking out of HW store with paint chips (darn, forgot to look for pickling salt!) I stepped off the edge of the curb, sprained my ankle. Another customer eventually helped me up, I drove across the street (back road) to "walkin" clinic that I couldn't make it down the stairs to, another patient went back in and asked if they could send someone out with ice they said no, so I went in first floor looking for elevator down, no such luck but the chiropractor in that office gave me an ice pack and insisted on electrically "stimulating" the area to improve the circulation/swelling, let me call DH, lent me crutches and wants to see me in the AM. So now I can't walk, not supposed to stand, and I don't know how I'm going to help my mom handle my niece and nephew tomorrow (if ex-SIL even brings them over after driving 100+ miles back from vacation with her parents). My parents haven't seen them since Tgiving. Much less pack for our own vacation - though Friday was going to be my packing day.

Processing time seems awfully short on that one, especially considering the fat. Hi Robin. I'm not generally a fan of green tomato anything; to me most green tomato recipes reflect a kind of end-of-harvest-desperation. But here's a green tomato mincemeat that does pass muster. It's been called "sinful." Green Tomato, Apple & Pear Mincemeat Use completely green tomatoes; they should not show white, yellow or pinkish cheeks. A pint will fill an 8-inch pie. With the addition of diced fresh apple, some nuts, a few snipped dried apricots, a dollop of rum or brandy, it will fill a 9-inch pie. 3 quarts coarsely chopped completely green tomatoes, scrubbed and trimmed of stem scars 1 Tablespoon canning and pickling salt 1 1/2 quarts diced, peeled and cored firm, tart apples, the firmer the better 1 quart diced, peeled and cored firm, slightly underripe pears 2 1/2 cups dark seedless raisins Grated zest (no white pith) and chopped pulp of 1 large or 2 medium oranges Grated zest of 1 1/2 large lemons 1/2 cup cider vinegar 1/2 cup undiluted frozen apple juice concentrate, thawed 3 1/2 cups (packed) light brown sugar 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger 1/2 cup dark rum, preferably Jamaican 1. Stir chopped green tomatoes and salt together, then scrape into a colander and let drain for 2 hours. 2. Combine drained tomatoes with all other ingredients except the rum. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Lower heat and cook mincemeat, uncovered, stirring often, until thick enough to mound in a spoon. Stir often to prevent sticking at the end of cooking. 3. Stir in the rum and ladle boiling-hot inot hot, clean pint canning jars, leaving 1/2" headspace; remove air bubbles. Seal with two-piece canning lids and process BWB 30 minutes. This comes from Helen Witty's Fancy Pantry, one of the best (if not the best) preserving books ever. I increased the BWB time by 5 minutes to reflect currant standards. Carol

Bre, I kind of think our pond is toast in terms of ever really holding water again. It is an old stock tank from back in the days when our property was part of the Johnson family farm. (Part of the Johnson family still lives on the rest of the farm property right next door.) Some of our neighbors who grew up here remember coming over to swim in the pond when they were kids.....likely in the 1940s, 50s or 60s....after a hard day's working helping their parents with the farm and ranch work. When we bought the place, the pond was full of water and fish. We built a fishing dock even before the builder started construction of the house. It was great while it lasted. The pond was spring-fed and never dried up. We bought the land in 1997, started construction of the house in either late summer or early fall of 1998 and moved here in 1999. The pond never ran dry. In 2003 we had the driest year we have experienced since moving here, with a little under 19" of rain. Average rainfall for us is about 38-39". We actually caught the fish in nets and moved them to the creek to save them as the pond dried up. In 2004 we had incredibly good rain, and the pond filled up with runoff. Unfortunately, the springs that previously had kept the pond filled never began running again after 2003. In 2005, we had a bad drought year, but the pond had held oodles of water from 2004, so as the creek dried up, we used nets to catch all the fish in the creek and move them back to the pond. Drought continued into 2006 and the pond dried up and the fish died. Since then, we haven't had fish in the pond, but that's okay because it rarely has water in it any more. We still had springs running in 3 other locations, though they had slowed down to very slow seepage, so our swamp became drier and drier. After drought in 2008-part of 09 and then in 2011 and 2012, the springs that fed the swamp dried up and haven't come back. We have kept water in our lily pond in the back yard by filling it with a water hose during droughts. Unfortunately, after the creeks and big ponds dried up, the water moccasins moved to our lily pond. This year we decided not to add water to the lily pond. It was almost dry and then we got all that rain in the last 4 weeks and now it has water again. Hopefully the water moccasins will stay away. Anyhow, we aren't going to add water to it, and when it dries up this summer, we'll fill it in with soil and turn it into a garden of some sort. When you look into the pond to admire the water lilies and have a cottonmouth snake staring back at you, it takes all the fun out of having a lily pond. You can shoot the water moccasins and we do, but in dry weather, more just show up. I will miss the lily pond, but the pathway that runs from our back door to the detached garage passes right by the lily pond and having venomous snakes that close to the pathway is just flat dangerous. And that is the sad history of how repeated drought has changed our property. If our springs were going to recharge and start running again, I think they would have done so after the very wet years of 2007, 2009 and 2010 and they didn't, so I think those springs are done. Soongrandmom and Al may be at their son's house in NE OK this week, where they are serving as consultants as their son and DIL plant and landscape their acreage. When she is there, she doesn't get online much. When I hear the word "panhandle", whether it is referring to the TX or OK panhandle (as well as Jay's corner of KS), desert is the word that pops into my head. When I was a kid, we were taught that area was once known as "no man's land" so that also is how I think of it. They called it no man's land because the annual rainfall was lower than what a family would need in order to raise enough crops to sustain themselves. If you've never read the book "The Worst Hard Time", which is about this region of the country during the Dust Bowl days, I recommend it highly. In a drought year when I think we have it bad, all I have to do is pick up this book and reread it to remind myself that our circumstances are not at all bad compared to those years. Whenever the author mentions Garden City, KS or Elkhart, KS, I think of Jay and his recent drought years there. I know that he has a fabulous garden only because he has worked so very hard to improve the soil because it cannot be easy to garden there period, much less to have a garden as productive and beautiful as his is. I don't think I'd be brave enough to even attempt to garden in No Man's Land. Our high temperatures were in the mid-90s in May quite often, back before the rain started falling. I was miserable with that early heat and no rainfall. It looked like we were headed for another tough year with the garden. Then, our weather pattern changed and we have been nice and cool just like y'all. This morning when I first went outside around sunrise it was 59 wonderful degrees and our forecast high is 81. I hope we only go to 81. Often, our actual high temperature will go as high as 5 degrees above our forecast high. That has been typical for the last 3 years, and I'd love for it to not be that way this year. Jay, I'm glad Kim will have you to give her advice since your conditions are more like hers than the conditions most of us have here in OK. My new garden area out back is in well-draining sandy soil and does so much better on lower moisture than my clayey big garden out front. For ages and ages I wouldn't touch this soil because it always has had the best wildflowers and I didn't want to plow them under, but recurring drought made it so hard to get succession crops through the summer without constant watering that I finally said farewell to those wildflowers and put in a garden there so I could grow more stuff earlier in the year and not have to rely on heavy succession cropping if it was a very dry summer. Now, when little weeds pop up in the new big garden area, if I recognize them as wildflowers, I dig them up and plant them outside the garden fence so that the wildlife and I still will have some of those wildflowers anyhow. I love the new garden area. OMG....it is so much easier to work with sandy-silty soil that with clay. I haven't even broken a single shovel or digging fork yet! : ) Kim, That's a cool benefit! When I was a kid, a couple of school employees lived in a house on the school ground and had a garden right there in their back yard. I walked by it every single day and think I was falling in love with gardening as early as 1st grade, just from watching their garden grow. My dad and many of our relatives had gardens, but it was that garden at the school that fascinated me. Later, those people moved to our street, so I got to keep watching them garden until they passed away in the late 1980s or early 1990s. They probably influenced my gardening as much as my dad's and uncle's gardens did. They were wonderful people, and I adored them. At some point when I was in about 4th or 5th grade, that little house was torn down as the school needed the space for expansion, and I missed seeing the garden right there on the school grounds. Some of us have been known to make maps on graph paper showing where each tomato plant is planted. Then, when the wind carries away the plant labels, we still know what is what. Some people keep track on their computer, but I just make my map on graph paper in a notebook. Then, I try my best not to lose or misplace the notebook during the garden season. After you've gardened long enough, you'll know which plants are which by their fruit unless you grow some varieties that grow fruit that looks like that of other varieties. I have to echo what Jay said about Cherokee Purple. I have grown it from different seed sources, and the source of the seeds makes all the difference. Nowadays, to the extent that it is possible, I prefer to get my tomato seeds from Gleckler's or from a handful of smaller, reliable seed companies like Victory Seeds, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Sample Seeds whose tomato varieties grow true to type. i have grown some CPs from purchased seed before that absolutely, positively were not the true CP. I do love Botanical Interests and they are one of my favorite seed companies. I save the seed packets from BI and from Renee's Garden Seeds to hang on the garden-themed Christmas tree on my sunporch every year since they are such gorgeous seed packets. Relax, even if you said you hated tomatoes, you'd still be welcome here. We are a very inclusive group. (grin) Now, I'll spend the rest of the summer trying to convince you that raw tomatoes are tasty. Much of the time, people who don't like fresh tomatoes have only eaten grocery store tomatoes, and all I can say about that is that it is no wonder they don't like tomatoes....they've never had a real, vine-ripe, fresh tomato eaten right sunshine-warm off the vine with the juice running down their chin. However, I will not harass you and try to force you to eat and like fresh tomatoes. They aren't everyone's cup of tea. I know a million ways to cook them too, including green tomato cake, so holler at me when you're ready for some recipes. When you need weather info, let me know. I have gotten pretty good at finding it online. I barely paid attention to the weather at all when we lived in Fort Worth. All I really cared about was what the high and low temp were forecast to be and if it was going to rain. Living here has taught me to be about a thousand times more aware of what the weather is doing. A gardener here faces so many weather-related challenges that we cannot just ignore the weather here and go on our merry way....or the weather will slap us down and teach us a lesson. I am starting to feel pretty good about this year. It feels to me like 2002 or 2004 and they both were great garden summers, though it is notable that each one of those great years then was followed by a horrible drought. We'd better enjoy this nice, cool, wet weather while it lasts because it rarely lasts as long as we'd like. Dawn