On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 13:31:13 -0700, The Real Bev
wrote:


The cherry tomato plants I planted from seed in spring 2005 are still
bearing -- they lasted all winter. In case anybody cares, the orange
variety is sweeter than the red variety. Didn't get enough of the
yellow ones to tell.

I absolutely agree on your assessment of cherry tomatoes. A friend
gave me one of the orange ones a couple years ago and now I grow only
that kind.
Dawn, who recently compared them again to the red ones and the orange
are just better.

wrote:
talking 'bout food wastage.. just look at the way folks stack food up
at all ya can eat buffets and the wastage.

i wish it was like Singapore, where, in a buffet, they weigh the food
you have not eaten on your plate and make you pay extra proportionally.

That seems like a bad idea: it would encourage overeating, because
if you get too much, it costs money not to eat it.

Wasting food is bad, but what is worse is overeating and being in
bad health as a result. It would be better to not have either happen,
but if you have to choose between them, wasting food is the better
choice. A little bit of food thrown in the trash (or compost heap,
or whatever) is a lot cheaper than a heart bypass, knee surgery,
diabetes meds, blood pressure meds, etc., etc., etc.

- Logan

Logan Shaw writes:

wrote:
talking 'bout food wastage.. just look at the way folks stack food up
at all ya can eat buffets and the wastage.
i wish it was like Singapore, where, in a buffet, they weigh the food
you have not eaten on your plate and make you pay extra proportionally.

That seems like a bad idea: it would encourage overeating, because
if you get too much, it costs money not to eat it.

Overeating isn't really a nice experience. While I do not think that
children should be forced to clear their plate - just being taught
early that they can a 2nd or 3rd helping - a normal adult should take
only on lesson and correct his behaviour accordingly, i.e. walk a 2nd
time to the buffet instead of wasting food from the buffet by piling
on huge helpings w/out eating them.

James wrote:
I have 20 tomatoe plants. I've noticed that I just toss a lot of
tomatoes that can really be used for soup or stew. Guess if I only had
one plant I would salvage blems by cutting out the bad parts. However
I'm just letting produce rot if it has a little blem or if it's a
little pass prime. Well it's not total waste since it just get
recycled in the soil. It's not like stuff being tossed by businesses
that end up in a landfill.

I freeze whole tomatoes, and just put them in stews and such in the
winter, making sauces out of home grow tomatoes is an incredible waste
of time and energy, in my experience...

wrote in message
...
General Schvantzkoph wrote:

On Sat, 16 Sep 2006 19:26:06 -0700, James wrote:

I have 20 tomatoe plants. I've noticed that I just toss a lot of
tomatoes that can really be used for soup or stew. Guess if I only had
one plant I would salvage blems by cutting out the bad parts. However
I'm just letting produce rot if it has a little blem or if it's a
little pass prime. Well it's not total waste since it just get
recycled in the soil. It's not like stuff being tossed by businesses
that end up in a landfill.

I'm letting mine rot. I have 36 plants which is an insane number, next
year I'll plant a lot fewer. My freezer is completely full of spaghetti
sauce, at least two years worth. I've given tomatoes away to friends and
coworkers. Now there is nothing left to do but let them rot.


Foodbank

If tomatoes weren't growing on that patch of ground, most likely it would be
lawn. Would you fret about wasting the lawn clippings? After all, they
could be used. Feeding them to goats or cows or rabbits (and in turn using
them for food) comes to mind, or using them in a methane digester (to
produce methane naturally, instead of burning natural gas), or composting
them and using the resulting humus elsewhere in the yard.

If you used more water and fertilizer and insecticides on the tomato plants
than you would have if the plot was part of your lawn, then it's a shame to
just let a lot of the crop rot away, but otherwise I don't think it's worth
a second thought. You've wasted a few bucks buying the seedlings (less if
you planted them from seed) but not enough to make a difference in your
life.

Chalk it up as a lesson, and next year plant what you need.

One year my father-in-law bought a dozen seedlings and gave them to me to
plant in the garden - they did extraordinarily well. That fall, just before
the first frost, I picked all the green ones, wrapped them individually in
newspaper, and put them in the spare room. They slowly ripened, and we had
"fresh" tomatoes for months. But they weren't as good as vine-ripened. I
never planted that many again.