I made new tomato cages this past summer from concrete reinforcing mesh.    They are sturdy and others who have made them claim they will be the last cages ever needed.  Time will tell.  The first few cages were very challenging to make, as the wire does not bend easily to form, is springy, is five feet tall and needs to be cut off the 150 ft. roll.  I eventually stopped trying to use wire cutters, and bolt cutters, and settled on using a 90 degree grinder cut off wheel to easily cut the lengths I needed,   my cages are roughly 2 feet in diameter.  I counted the number of 6 inch squares in the metal mesh instead of measuring each of them. 

I am really happy with the cages and will make more in due time.  The one thing that these cages need, is a sturdy support, so that the weight of the tomatoes and any wind does not knock them about.  I used T posts driven in to the ground and attached to each cage. 

Next spring I plan to make a fence around the garden with the cages to deter invasion by my larger four legged neighbors.  The tall border should be an interesting change. When placing the cages, I intend to space them approximately a foot apart, to allow good flow of air between the plants as they mature, access for picking and pruning, and sun light to pass between into the center of the garden.  There will be  strands of  wire or twine connecting the rows  of cages,  and the t-posts will be anchoring the ends of the rows.

Lunch!  I am not sure that there is a better summer lunch than having a fresh juicy vine ripe tomato chunked into a bowl , eaten in the hand like an apple, or sliced onto a hearty slice of bread for a fresh healthy and filling meal.  I like to take my lunch to work and in the fresh tomato season that includes the fresh tomato cut up into bite sized pieces along with other fresh chopped veggies from my garden or one of the local farmers markets. Drizzle with a bit of oil and some balsamic vinegar this is delightful.

Sauce.  My favorite preserving method is to crush my Roma paste type tomatoes, along with plenty of garlic, sweet pepper and onion into a very large kettle and cook the mixture until it is very thick.  The ratios of ingredients are not terribly important to me.  For about a half bushel or five gallon bucket of tomatoes, I add two or three cups each of pepper and onion.  I add three to five heads of garlic.  In some years I have added grated carrots. Once the sauce seems to be  thick enough, I add fresh chopped basil leaves.  I prefer to pressure can the sauce in pint jars for year round garden goodness.

Dried tomatoes.  Here in Michigan,  I don’t like to sun dry my tomatoes becasue our humidity levels can be high in the summer.  I use a home dehydrator to dry the paste style tomatoes into what I have recently started calling ‘tomato bacon’ or ‘tomato jerky’.   The process usually takes about 24 hours in our current dehydrator. The result is a hard tomato strip, that can be used in dinner dishes like pasta or re-hydrated into any warm dishes.  The flavors are bright and  tangy. 

Salsa.   I regularly enjoy eating the summers tomato bounty as salsa with corn chips. My home made salsa is not as sticky or creamy as commercial salsa, but the flavor is right from the garden.    Garlic, onion, sweet pepper join the tomatoes in the cooking pot usually along with a packet of salsa ingredients from Mrs. Wages or Ball brands. 
Click on the picture to order it through Amazon, if your local stores don’t carry them.

Diced Tomato.  We use the crudely chopped chunks of tomatoes in our soups, stews and chili recipes throughout the year.  The easiest method of preserving the summer goodness is to roughly chop the cleaned and cored tomatoes into a large bowl.  Mash them into pint jars, really pushing them down into the jars until they are juicing, then adding citric acid and processing the jars.  To get a little farther along in the preparation of the future meal, I also add onion and pepper crudely chopped to the bowl and mix them with the tomatoes before filling the pint jars.  I have started using citric acid instead of white vinegar to keep the acid level appropriate for safe canning. the result is a thicker product in the jar after processing.  I used Ball Jar Citric Acid.  Click on the picture to order it through Amazon, if you can not find it in your local stores.

New and sixth use of the tomato abundance

Ketchup.  I purchased some of the Mrs.Wages Ketchup mix that was on clearance a few years ago.  This past week I decided to try making the ketchup.  Julie is brand loyal to her off the shelf ketchup , but since I started enjoying balsamic vinegar ketchup, she  suggested that I use balsamic vinegar in place of the plain jane white distilled vinegar that the Mrs. Wages recipe calls for.   The result is delicious.  I have not opened a jar of  the hot water bath preserved ketchup, but tastes of the small amount left after canning make me think this is a good use of shelf space.

The tomatoes have started arriving.  They are not overrunning us yet, but one ripe fruit  a day and I can see many green orbs are hiding in the plantings.  This year we have planted more than varieties than past years. As I started growing my own transplants from seed.  We have at least 25 plants of just paste tomatoes grown from seed.  I found the seed in a 35mm film canister in the refrigerator this past February. Julie saved the seeds several years ago.  I guess we should take stock of the items is in the fridge more often.  

The photograph above shows a Thorburn's Terra-Cotta fruit that was grown from seed.   This fruit has a deep orange color with green shoulders that are a slight challenge in determining if it is ripe.  The inside jell around the  seeds is green.   The flavor surprised me. I was expecting a sharp unripe flavor, but these fruits are mild and slightly sweet.  The fruits I have picked have been about 2 - 3 inches across, not quite sandwich sized, but very good chopped into a salad.

With the new year comes the rainbow of colorful catalogs spilling with the latest flowers and vegetables, and you’ll undoubtedly find them peppered with the distinctive logo for the All-America Selections award.

This is one of the few award programs focused on the home gardener. Unique in today’s marketplace, the All-America Selections program (AAS) is not a brand affiliated with a marketing organization or a particular company, plant breeder or distribution company. It is a contest, a rigorous unbiased garden trial and evaluation that helps identify the best new plant varieties.

Established in 1932, the goal was to provide gardening and farm publications and the budding garden club movement with reliable information on the best new garden seeds. The program was a great success, and over the years the award has become a trusted indicator of a good plant choice for the garden.

Each year companies submit their latest flower and vegetable seeds for consideration for the award. Trial gardens must meet some rather exacting criteria, and are distributed across North America in 30 states and five Canadian provinces. We are fortunate to have three of these trial sites in Michigan, one in East Lansing on the Michigan State University campus, another near Grand Rapids, and a third in Litchfield (south of I-94 and East of I-69 South). 

Plants must be new and previously untried, and are evaluated for significant improvement over existing varieties of their type. For flowers, this includes novel flower forms or colors, flowers showing above the foliage, fragrance, length of flowering season, and pest and disease tolerance. For vegetables, earliness to harvest, total yield, fruit taste and fruit quality, ease of harvest, plant habit and disease or pest resistance.

Judges must be skilled and impartial, and are qualified and trained by AAS to apply standard criteria when evaluating the plants. Judges are not paid for their participation, and are typically horticultural professionals from academic and industry backgrounds. Each fall, the scores are tallied and awards announced to the horticultural press, cooperative extension agents and garden clubs, with no consumer-direct promotion from the AAS.

In addition to the trial gardens for evaluation of the potential new winners, AAS encourages display gardens for plants that have won the award. Gardens may feature the vegetable or flower winners, or both, and can be found in 45 states, the District of Columbia, six Canadian provinces and Japan. In Michigan, you’ll find them in Frankenmuth, Kalamazoo, Midland’s Dow Gardens, Tipton’s Hidden Lake Gardens, and near the trial gardens in East Lansing and Lichtfield.

The AAS supplies these gardens with seed of about 50 varieties, including current year winners, four years previous winners, and a preview of the next year’s winners. Gardens are required to have access to a greenhouse to grow the seed for transplant, provide an attractive setting, good presentation, and ensure that displays are well-labeled for visitors.

The program continues to evolve, and in 2013 a new award designation was added for regional winners. Program leaders realized that gardening success is very much climate-dependent. The rigorous testing might show, for example, that a plant is very well-suited for the humidity and heat of our summers, but fail to win a national award because it falters in the dry extremes of the southwest.  A regional award will highlight those more specialized plants for gardeners in their ideal climate.

New for 2015, AAS is expanding the program beyond seed-grown plants—for the first time also considering those that are vegetatively propagated. 

Over the next few weeks I will highlight the latest winners, options to consider as you peruse those catalogs for spring planting ideas.