The tomatoes are coming! The tomatoes are coming!

Three of our tomato plants have begun to set fruit, including Phoenix, a variety we're trying for the first time this year. It's tricky getting the timing right on tomatoes here, because although they are a warm-weather crop, if they don't set fruit before the 100+ days get here, they never will. We usually have good success setting out transplants around Valentine's Day, but if we get a late frost, they're toast. If you want to grow tomatoes from seed here, you need to start (and keep them) indoors in January. I don't attempt too much indoor growing because our cats will devour anything green. One of the cats even ate a miniature rose bush I mistakenly placed on a windowsill!

My usual tomato varieties are Early Girl and Roma, yellow pear, and Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes, and then I like to also try a few other varieties. Basically, for spring planting I try to look for something with a fairly short time-to-harvest, and small to medium size fruit. The large beefsteak type tomatoes don't do well here, at least not for me. It's theoretically possible to harvest a fall crop of tomatoes here by planting in July and protecting the young plants from the sun, but I've tried that twice and been disappointed with the results. Once, we had dozens of beautifully progressing green tomatoes on the vines, only to be hit by an uncharacteristically early December frost. The other factor is day length-tomatoes need long days to mature, so even if the frost doesn't get them, they will take forever to ripen, and when and if they finally do, they don't taste as good as summer tomatoes.

If the weather cooperates, we should be picking dozens of fresh tomatoes by late May, and of course they all seem to ripen at once. That isn't usually a problem for us, because we like homemade fresh tomato soup, and I also freeze some in zip-lock bags for later use. It isn't even necessary to blanch and peel them first...just wash them and put them in the freezer. When you are ready to cook with them, you'll find the skins slip off easily.