Tomatoes are Trickling In

The tomatoes have been growing fast in the summer heat and though many of them have set fruit, none of them have been  starting to ripen until now.  I have been doing my best to keep the plants trained to the trellis, but many of them have reached the top, so now my only option is to allow them to grow over to the other side.  I have stopped trimming the suckers off at this point since I would like them to grow as much fruit as possible now that they have reached the height I wanted.  We are heading for fall soon and it would be nice to get a good crop before the first frost. I was hoping to be able to move the chicken coop over this bed when it was done raising chickens for the season.  The plan was to have the coop double as a greenhouse in the winter, so all I need to do is cover it with plastic when the time comes.

.  One of the cherry tomatoes on the end has decided to start turning red.  It has large clusters of fruits that are close to the ground and those have been the first to go.  They only took a few days once they started and then they seemed to stall with a large amount of green near the stem.  I decided to try one anyway to see if it was ripe enough and by golly it surely was!  There is nothing else on earth like the taste of the first ripe summer tomato picked fresh off the vine.

The vines are thick and the plants are heavy with fruit.  I think when they start ripening I will be spending even more time preserving food in the kitchen if that is possible.  Either that or I may freeze them all until I can get around to processing them.  Any tomatoes that I freeze will become a basic tomato sauce and likely all the fresh ones will end up as salsa for as long as the peppers and onions hold out.