It is getting to be tomato time. At least it is in my area. July is definitely the month of

tomatoes for me and I'm usually swimming in them because I plant a lot of tomato plants.

But what if you don't have as many planted as I do yet you are still hoping to preserve your

tomatoes? Today's Q&A addresses this question that I've received

multiple times, and that is how do I preserve my tomatoes when I'm only getting a trickle of a harvest?

A lot of times that is either coming on the front end of the season, which may be you right now,

or the tail end of the season. Even if you're

growing indeterminate tomatoes, which don't typically produce that big couple of week flush,

like the determinate tomatoes, they still have a season where they're producing a lot. And most of

us can have no problem preserving during that period of time. But on the beginning of the season,

the tail end of the season, or maybe you just have a few tomato plants, you find yourself having

some tomatoes that are ripe, but you don't have enough for a can or load. What can you do to still

be able to preserve them? Because maybe you've got too many that you can use fresh but not

enough to preserve. It's kind of a predicament that a lot of us find ourselves in and I've heard

from many of you that have struggled with this as well. Well there's a couple of different options that

you can choose. The first one let's talk about if you are starting to see that trickle in the front

end of the season.

If you're growing slicer tomatoes and you're probably eating them fresh, but if you're growing

determinate tomatoes, the purpose was probably for canning. So what can we do with those early ones?

Well, one thing that you can do, and especially if you're growing Roma tomatoes or other

determinate tomatoes, a lot of times those first ones are the ones that tend to have some blossom

in rot on them, which is not what we want to have for our first fruits of the season.

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