cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1803373
Man, if you ever want to eat 10,000 tomatoes in a season, plant yourself a Spoon Tomato.
I made the mistake of growing two of these last summer, and each grew up, over, and across the length of my trellis arch, about 20' in length. To keep them from utterly smothering their neighbors required pruning fistfuls of vines literally daily.
It's insanely prolific in fruits too, I gave up harvesting them all when I was picking hundreds a day. That sounds great, but each is the size of a pea or smaller, and they had the tendency to split at the top rather than keeping their caps, so they didn't store well at all.
The flipside is they do have a great tart, intense tomato flavor. I mostly ate them as garden snacks, or sprinkled on salads or focaccia.
[Image description: a small metal spoon holding a dozen tiny, bright red round cherry tomatoes. Green tomatoes and flowers are seen on the vine adjacent to the spoon.]
Annoyingly, Lemmy keeps erroring when I try to respond to more comments, so I'm going to try a new comment and tag people.
@Jojo-Mcfrost572@kbin.social
"Inland southern California, zone 9b. Typically get the seeds started in late December, early January, and the bulk of my harvest is in June, before the heat of summer stops the flower set. By then, I'm usually battling spider mites, which combined with the heat stress inevitably kills off my plants."
@athos77@kbin.social
"Oh yes, I'm sure you could process them, it just wasn't worth the effort for me.
Last year I kinda went insane with the number of tomato plants I grew, if you look at the /c/tomatoes community header, it's a picture of my kitchen counter completely covered with tomatoes. At peak harvest, I was pulling out at least 100lbs of tomatoes a week. When you've got a dozen 2lb tomatoes to eat/process, dealing with micro ones becomes less appealing."