I headed outside to check on things just a little while ago. The winds are quite severe right now, and I was eyeballing some of the trees, wondering which one was going to come down, next! At least the wind is blowing in a direction where they would fall away from the house, not towards it.

After picking up a few fallen branches – not many – I checked on the garden.

The trellised tomatoes definitely needed some help! Even a few of the Romas needed to get extra support. The big surprise with them is how many of the almost ripe tomatoes I’d left behind were now ready to pick! I hadn’t planned on that and ended up using the bottom of my shirt to hold them all.

I had to add more support to a number of Indigo Blues and Black Beauties, plus adding structural support to the Black Beauty trellis. With the wind direction going through the garden, the plant laden trellises were acting like sails!

These are all the tomatoes that were picked today, including from this morning. On the left are the Black Beauties, including a broken branch I found, with a couple of tomatoes on it. I just looked up how to tell when Black Beauties are ripe, and I can’t say it helped much. From the photos and video I saw, the are supposed to get more red on the bottom. Other articles said they get completely dark. As you can see, one is completely purple on the bottom. The colour is photo sensitive, so the parts that get the most sunlight are the darkest. The ones with bright green on the bottom are at least clearly not-ripe. The information I found also said they should start to be soft and slightly squishy. They are all rock hard! Which means even the all purple one is not ripe.

I think.

They are now laid out on a screen in the cat free zone and will hopefully continue to ripen. The Roma VF tomatoes don’t need more time, but they will be fine like this until we find a sauce recipe we want to try. The Indigo Blues, for the most part, should be ready for fresh eating now.

I think.

On a completely different note, our new bread machine has been cleaned and set up, and we just need to wait for a couple of ingredient to reach room temperature before we start our first basic loaf. I’m quite looking forward to it!

Meanwhile, I’m going to start looking up some basic, refrigerator tomato sauce recipes now!

The Re-Farmer