A couple of weeks ago, I sent an email out talking about how many tomato products I was canning

because my goal was to be able to can enough tomato products to last our family all year.

Last year, we were able to do that. No problem. We had a great year last year. And this year

is looking about the same, hopefully. It's still a little bit too early to tell.

But in response to that email, Aaron emailed me asking me a question that I thought was so good

that I wanted to answer it here because you may be having the same question.

So I'm just going to read to you her question.

She says, Dear Jill, I'm curious to know how many tomato plants you have to harvest so much

to can. I have yet to get a decent tomato harvest because of other issues, much less enough to preserve

a harvest. And I think that is such a good question. As I may have mentioned before,

I don't really like the charts that say this is how many you need to plant for this amount of

preserved product. Although some of that can be rather accurate, especially if you're talking about

a crop like onions or garlic or

carrots when you know one-to-one how many plants you plant, that's how many you're going to get.

But with tomatoes in particular, I have found that to be such a moving target because there are

so many different factors to how much of a harvest we can expect from our tomato harvest in general.

And so I wanted to just kind of go over what I shared with Aaron in case it might give you

a little bit more information to know how much you might need to plant and how to know

how many to plan for maybe next year.

To answer her question simply, I have about 50 tomato plants, but the production in those individual tomato plants varies

widely. And if you're a regular listener to the podcast, you know that, you know that depending on

where I plant my tomatoes and also what kind of tomatoes

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