A friend gave me four tomato plant starts and I put them in the raised bed that was filled using the hügelkultur method a few years back. This gives them all the nutrients they need and they sure do produce! They’re above my head at this point.
I picked 64 ripe tomatoes one week and more than 50 tomatoes the next week. And so on.
Chateau Marmande
These are Chateau Marmande tomatoes. Marmande tomatoes are French heirloom. It is determinate, meaning that it reaches a certain height and then stops, and it ripens all of its fruit almost at once (over maybe just two weeks). Last week I picked many tomatoes although not as much, and this week has been the peak. There are only a few green tomatoes left to ripen. It’s a short amount of time, so it’s not like you can have a few tomatoes every week for your meals. With this plant, you need a plan for using a lot of tomatoes at once, such as canning salsa, dehydrating tomatoes, or giving them away to neighbors and friends.
Techniques for better production
This harvest has been better than in the past because I spent extra time and effort on these plants. One thing I did differently this year is extra pruning of all non-fruit-bearing branches in the bottom 12” of the plant. This allowed a lot more air flow.
Another benefit of the pruning was that it gave the tomato plant the stress it needed to bear more and better fruit. Like humans, plants also need some good stress to motivate and keep them alive. A life with no adversity leads to weakness.
Tomato Crisps
This year, I decided to make tomato crisps. My niece helped me slice the tomatoes thinly, then dry the slices with paper towels, and place them on the wire dehydrator racks.
I dried that first batch at 110-115 degrees Farenheit for 19 hours.
The dehydrated slices were good, but not as crispy as I wanted, so I dried the next batch for 18 hours at 125 degrees Fahrenheit. I also sliced them a little bit thicker and peeled them off the racks mid-way through (they stick a little) so that they wouldn’t break into pieces when I pulled them off the rack when finally dry.
Savillum 