I spent the afternoon yesterday continuing the garden prep for the winter. I had to figure out how to secure plastic sheeting over my hoop tunnels and came up with skinny sand worms, :-)
I just bought nylon utility fabric and stitched them into long tubes. I bought the cheapest bag of sand from the hardware store and filled them up. They seem to work pretty well so far.
The other thing I did besides killing my tomato plant was sanitize all of my tomato cages and empty pots with a little bleach diluted in water. I cleaned out the patio of unnecessary gardening junk- old milk cartons that I had used to transplant seedlings, broken stakes, broken plastic pots, etc. My gardening prep chores also included chasing out squirrels trying to bury their acorns in my potted plants!!!
This morning, I finally got to putting up my ripened Amish Paste tomatoes.
Since I didn't have a large quantity of tomatoes to actually preserve by canning, I decided to freeze them. My tomatoes weren't the prettiest by the calyx so I wanted to remove the skin before freezing. I cut a small "X" at one end of the tomato and boiled them for about a minute or so and immediately dunked them in ice water for about 5 to 10 minutes. The skins just slid right off. I cut off any of the gnarly parts, sliced them in half and bagged them.
I still have much more to do before the winter comes like finishing the rest of the sand worms for the rest of my beds and mulching, but that will have to wait until next weekend! Happy Sunday!
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