September is Tomatoes

Despite what the media (and therefore, now pretty much everyone else you run into) tells you, summer has not ended.  Nor will it end tomorrow, when Labor Day weekend is over and all of Michigan's kids enrolled in public schools start a new school year.

Summer does not end with the beginning of September.  Summer break from classes might end, and vacation time for most workers might end, but summer is still going strong.  Summer does not end until the autumnal equinox in late September.  The growing season does not end until we've had a series of frosts in October.

At this little place here, September is still summer, still the growing season; and because it is still summer, the garden does not end yet.  Nope, not hardly. September is when the garden cranks out tomatoes left and right.  They begin, the first tentative orangey blushes, in mid-August, but the plants don't really get going with the vermilion orbs until September.  September is tomatoes.

Currently, my kitchen island (which is 6 foot long by 3 foot wide) is completely covered in tomatoes.  All of which were picked in one day, just the ripest ones, and leaving the almost ripe ones for a few days in the future (say, tomorrow since these were picked yesterday).  That's a lot of tomatoes.  But it's really just the beginning of the tomato harvest for us.

Friday I made pico de gallo. Saturday I made and canned a batch of tomato sauce and a double sized batch of salsa.  Sunday we ate BLTs for lunch, the cumulation of which used up all the tomatoes I had picked up to that point.  Sunday afternoon DD2 and I picked more tomatoes, filling the island.

Today I am making more tomato sauce to can, and canning chopped tomatoes.  I started the day by making omelets with tomatoes, and also made a fresh batch of pico for snacking on.

Pick tomatoes, process tomatoes.  This will be my two-day rotation for the entire month. It doesn't stop until the first killing frost comes in October.  September is tomatoes.