Brooklyn1 wrote:
....
Just how many acres of tomatoes do you grow that you can average your
yield accurately in a 50 percentile range, or do you just have a
couple three plants... I'm serious...

between 16 and 50 plants depending upon what we
have for space and what we need to put up. it is
easy to measure output in the rough because a full
pail of tomatoes runs about 22lbs and when canned
that usually ends up around 7 quarts. do it enough
times and you get an idea of what the yeild roughly
is.


I put in about fifty plants of
various types and often plants right next to each other have a very
different yield.

yes, that is true, i just measure it roughly as
a whole and we keep track of what we can so that
gives us a lower bound (i don't keep track of what
we eat fresh).


However with ~fifty plants I always harvest way WAY
more than I can use, I give plenty away, feed those bitten by rodents
and bugs to deer, and at end of season I harvest many more green
tomatoes than I feel like frying/pickling...

we put them in the garage on a table and they
eventually ripen, they are not as good as fresh
but they are better than nothing or most of what
we get at the store. a few will rot, but while
i love fried green tomatoes i can't eat that
many of them.


deer eat green tomatoes
too. I long ago gave up canning tomatoes, salad tomatoes are too wet
and besides I can buy canned romas by the case at the big box stores
and use those to make sauce for a whole lot less money, time, and
labor.

to me the whole reason for growing veggies is
to cut down on food expenses and i like knowing
what goes into the food i eat. canned store bought
tomatoes taste like metal to me.

the silly thing of it all is that i'm getting
reactive to tomatoes. after 50something years of
eating many lbs a year and now i start reacting
to them?


The only time I may weigh/photograph is when I happen to find
an exceptionally large/unique specimen. I've actually never bothered
to weigh/count any of my crops, there's always more than I can
possibly use... in fact a few years ago I decided to donate a third of
my 2,500 sq ft garden to growing blueberry bushes.

i'd like to put in blueberry bushes too, but at the
moment i'm having fun with what is here.

as we grow many flowers in addition to the veggies
and a lot of our space is just wasted IMO we don't
get a huge over production, but when we do Ma will
turn it into something and take it around to the
families or we'll can it or i'll make jam.


songbird