We picked 27 pounds of tomatoes on Saturday. It was the first time this year that I’ve actually weighed anything. I always think produce weighs more than it does. I estimated the tomatoes would weigh close to 40 pounds, so when they came in under 30, I decided to revise my estimates for last week. Instead of 20 pounds of tomatoes last week, I’m going to say we picked 15 pounds last week.
Of course, we picked a lot more than 27 pounds of tomatoes this week. The 27 pounds was just what we picked on Saturday. But we had been picking tomatoes all week. 35 pounds would be a very conservative estimate. That’s pretty exciting. And there are a lot more that will need to be picked in the next few days.
We have been dehydrating tomatoes and making salsa like we’re crazy. The Ronco dehydrator can’t keep up with the influx of tomatoes, so we’ve been using our oven as well. It actually has a dehydrate mode, so we can set the temperature, timer, etc. I wasn’t sure how hot to set it, but so far we’ve been using 140 degrees and it seems to be working well. We tend to cut the tomato slices thicker and thicker in an attempt to get more tomatoes on the trays at the same time. 1/2 an inch is about as thick as I dare go, but it makes it easy to get a ton of tomatoes in the oven at once.
I didn’t keep track of all the peppers we’ve picked this week, but I’m guessing we picked about 20 large green bell peppers, 30 jalapeño peppers, 20 banana peppers, 10 serrano peppers, and 10 cayenne peppers. I try to give away as many hot peppers as I can, since we have so many. Anytime I give away peppers, I always include some hot peppers and tell them they can throw them away if they can’t figure out how to use them.
As for me, I’ve started getting creative with my use of hot peppers as well. I even chopped up about 1/3 of a cayenne pepper into my fruit smoothie today. I think I’ll use 1/2 of one tomorrow.
We also started picking our cantaloupe this week. So far they’re just parked in the fridge, but I expect to cut into them in the next few days.
