When You Have Lemons, [Make Dried Tomatoes]

I wear my discomfort like a badge of honor; if I ain’t hurtin’, drop the curtain. By definition farming is a demanding profession, and a young person’s profession at that. I got into the game late in life and I can’t possibly play catch-up without it all, well, catching up to me.

The author of Mark's Work, circa 1983

My special area of interest is tomatoes, primarily because of their versatility when it comes to preserving them for winter use. Beginning in 1974, the summer following my release from the Big Green Machine, I began growing tomatoes in San Jose, and putting them up in a couple of different ways.

I cut them in quarters and cold-packed them, and I made a marinara sauce, to the extent that I always canned enough to get me through to the next year. Still, I am talking maybe twenty or twenty-five tomato plants, not enough to call in the cavalry.

Compare that to this summer, where there are a total of 295 tomato plants on the west end of HappyDayFarms, or as I like to call it, my back yard. I harvest Sunday and Monday for Monday’s market, and Wednesday and Thursday for Thursday’s market. About three-fourths of the work must be done Kaepernick-style, taking a knee. Either that or I must just plop myself down on my bottom, and scoot along, because I sure am not popping up and down like a weasel.

Already I have done a marathon marinara sauce batch, and a mammoth batch of catsup, each producing almost exactly seven-and-a-half gallons. I have plans to put up varying amounts of pizza sauce, tomato paste, hot sauce and salsa, along with as many cold-packed tomatoes as I can get away with.

There is one additional player in the lineup this summer, making its debut (for me) in quite a splashy style, and that is the drying of tomatoes. Though GlutenFreeMama has dabbled in the past, it was always for use in her own kitchen. Now, I am drying tomatoes for either selling at market, or putting into one of the CSA’s (Community Sponsored Agriculture) that HappyDayFarms orchestrates.

I was motivated by the dozen Giuseppe tomato starts given to me by BossLady, back in April, but since then the whole drying tomatoes thing has taken off. After I had harvested the first flush of drying tomatoes, I did a little research to find out more about preserving them.

The one common theme in all the sites I visited was that you can pretty much dry any kind of tomato you want. The difference is simply the amount of liquid contained within the tomato itself. With that thought in mind, the realization that I could also dry the Heinz sauce tomatoes hit me upside the head like a big squishy tomato.

I have more than 120 of these sauce tomato plants, and many of them are producing fruit as small as cherry tomatoes. Now catsup doesn’t care if the tomatoes are big or small, but small lends itself more to drying them because it takes a whole lot of little tomatoes to make even a teaspoon of catsup. 

A whole lot of little tomatoes, on the other hand, will produce a whole lot of dried tomatoes. Right now I have ten quarts of dried tomato chips, far beyond anything I originally envisioned. And this is only the third week in August.

As a farmer I am humbled every day of my life at the vagaries of growing food. Whether it’s critters, heat, blossom end rot, water issues, inconsistent production, or the harvest itself, I trip over my shortcomings daily. I know there is too much nitrogen on the newly extended part of the rows, because I was nonchalantly liberal with my distribution of chicken manure last March, straight from the coop to the fields.

Ach tung, Chucko. By skipping the time spent amidst the decomposing matter in the compost pile, I planted tomato plants in soil that was simply too hot. It was a rookie mistake and produced magnificent plants with fruit that is tainted. 

Additionally, I was nonchalantly stingy with both compost and amendments on the rest, taking for granted the potency of the topsoil. As a result the fruit is plentiful but small, making drying them seem so attractive. I call it making dried tomatoes out of lemons, if you get my mixed metaphor.

So sure, my surgically rebuilt right shoulder was aching this morning for some unfathomable reason, and my surgically rebuilt left knee was grumbling too, but both have rallied bravely, thanks to my meds. There is just something too magical about a pristinely clean bong, and a rip of AC/DC, to get my body parts all in synch.

I’ll need them running on all [two] cylinders today because GlutenFreeMama wants to make batch of smoked paprika catsup, my favorite!