EDITOR’S NOTE: This gardening column is authored by Eric Larson.
Processing tomatoes into a spaghetti sauce can be a lot of work beyond raising the plants.
Harvesting or picking enough tomatoes can be a challenge as you select those that would be good for your sauce — and that’s just the start.
Cleaning all the stuff off the tomatoes is the second effort. There can be a bitterness to skins or seeds as if you leave them in the sauce.
Processing tomatoes after picking requires a blanching process. There is cutting Roma tomatoes and then cleaning and preparing other items in the sauce. You can spend 4 to 5 hours on spaghetti sauce alone.
But the taste of homemade spaghetti sauce is the best.
If you have tomatoes that are splitting, harvest the tomatoes quickly. If you let them stay on the vine a little longer, the sugars in the tomatoes will also cause the tomatoes to turn bad faster.
Ripe tomatoes picked too fast can ferment and turn bad and be completely unusable.
This comes to the treasure that I’d like to share with you this week.
I have a recipe from the Boston Restaurant dating back to the 1940s through the 1960s which was located in Mansfield. Their spaghetti sauce had a certain renown and while the restaurant was closing, my friend’s family preserved the recipe and is prepared to share it with all of my readers today.
Boston Restaurant Spaghetti Sauce
This recipe starts out with ½ bushel of tomatoes and makes 12 quarts of spaghetti sauce.
The Boston Restaurant spaghetti sauce requires 4 hot peppers, 3 pounds of onions (12 medium), 2 or 3 garlic buds, 1 pint of cooking or olive oil, 1 cup of sugar, ½ cup of canning salt, 3 tablespoons of Italian seasoning, 48 ounces of tomato paste.
I never tried the Boston Restaurant, but others that have can certainly share their thoughts.
Here are some pointers for harvesting your tomatoes.
Ripe tomatoes are susceptible to being damaged by the rain. Once the tomatoes start ripening, check the vines almost daily in order to harvest them at their peak.
Cut or gently twist off the fruits, supporting the vine at the same time to keep from damaging it.
Since some of the varieties have thicker skins, you will need to watch the thicker-skinned tomatoes such as Roma tomatoes as they become ripe.
As the season comes to an end keep in mind most plants can survive a light frost if adequately mulched, but at the first sign of a heavy frost, harvest all the fruits, even the green ones.
To continue enjoying fresh tomatoes, cut a few suckers from a healthy and preferably a determinate plant and root them.
Plant in good potting soil in a 3-gallon pot or larger container.
Keep in a warm, sunny spot, and with a little luck and care, you can enjoy fresh tomatoes through some of the fall and into the winter.
Ripe tomatoes will keep refrigerated for several weeks usually, and green ones will eventually ripen if kept in a warm place out of direct sunlight.
To slowly ripen green tomatoes, and thereby extend your harvest, wrap them in newspaper and place in a dark, cool area, checking frequently to make sure that none rot.
Rotting fruit gives off a gas called ethylene, which causes other fruit to ripen too fast.
Sliced green tomatoes are delicious when lightly dipped in flour or cornmeal and black pepper and fried.
Combat Wilt disease
As you wrap up the harvest, you should try to record the results of your season.
By remembering to record the results of the season, as you look at each crop, you will have a chance to address the challenges you faced this year.
An example of the benefit of this preventative is dealing with this fungal Wilt disease.
The fungal Wilt disease that remains in the soil can affect the tomato harvest in the future. This is one of the reasons that the bottom of the tomato plants turns brown.
It seems that as the tomatoes were coming up, there this is a disease that stays in the soil that can only develop over time. This disease is hard to get out of the soil and hard to treat.
What you need to do is rotate your tomatoes out of that location. Keeping records will help you make the right decision next year.
If you plant another tomato in that same place, next year’s tomato plant will suffer from the same disease you had this year.
A major recommendation I have for all gardeners is to do an end-of-season review and make some records. There are some homemade remedies that have been shown as working against wilt diseases.
Here is a remedy and an application to help with some of these soil diseases.
Tomato blight can be controlled by a simple dry powder application of milk and other materials. Dry mix 1/3 cup of non-fat milk, ¼ cup of Epsom salt, 1 gallon, or shovel full, of dry and screened compost. Mix the ingredients thoroughly.
As you dig the hole for your transplant, sprinkle some of the mix over the hole as you plant. This mix increases the tomato plant’s vigor, disease resistance, and insect pest resistance.
Tomatoes have an amazing list of plants, which can alleviate many different challenges that you may have.
Companion planting with a plan is something you could look at next year. Asparagus is protected by tomatoes from asparagus beetle.
Gooseberries are protected by tomatoes from a variety of insects.
Asparagus, bee balm, carrots, celery, cucumbers, roses, peppers, chives, onions, parsley, marigolds, mints, basil, oregano, nasturtiums, geraniums, petunias, spinach, and borage are compatible with tomatoes.
What is odd is that two weeds specifically, stinging nettles and redroot pigweeds, are both beneficial to tomatoes.
Avoid crop rotation when it comes to tomatoes, unless you have a wilt disease, which is a soil-borne disease, then move to another area.
Because tomatoes are heavy feeders you need to have a deep layer of compost, and have a good layer of mulch, reducing water needs, and which will also help control wilt diseases.
There are any number of leaf diseases in tomatoes, which means that tomatoes should be watered from below and deeply.
One of the challenges in growing tomatoes is that this plant is truly susceptible to tobacco mosaic virus as are 200 other plants, which means that you should take precautions when you have smokers working in your tomatoes.
Tobacco Mosaic Virus in tomatoes starts out looking like just a leaf disease with yellow streaks or yellow spots appearing. The plant can die quickly following the initial part of the infection.
I hope you have a great stroll through your garden this week. If you have some challenges, contact me at ericlarson546@yahoo.com.
This column will be available at my blog at www.ohiohealthyfoodcooperative.org.