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.]
FYI it’s basically a wild type of the domesticated tomato. Hundreds of small flavor filled little fruit perfect for birds and other small animals to eat and disperse the seeds.
Humans selected for larger fruit.
Hah! Well that makes a lot of sense. I’ll take my beefsteaks over these any 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.
Toss them in a pot and simmer them down part way, then press them through a colander to remove the skins. Then simmer the non-skin stuff some more. Depending on how much you want to be involved, you can do soup, marinara, pizza sauce, etc.
Honestly, what I do when I get overwhelmed with tomatoes is to simmer them all down to tomato paste, then I freeze it in an ice cube tray. I can get like 3 gallons of crushed tomatoes down to like 15-20 ice cubes, and I freeze them and move them into a large Ziploc. Then anytime I need tomato anything, it’s there. I can use it as is, reconstitute with water to make sauce, puree, whatever. And then I can use the paste/puree/sauce to make marinara or pizza sauce or whatever.
It’s not as satisfying as eating them fresh, but less stressful than trying to keep up with infinite produce and getting sick of it - I learned my lesson from lettuce month!
If you want something vaguely similar but with a more random appearance and size, I swear that harvested seeds from the Costco assorted cherry tomatoes are proving for the second year to be incredibly hardy and prolific.
Yeah, I posted about a couple a volunteers I’ve got in my backyard that don’t look quite like any variety I’ve grown before. I’ve given them no love or water, but they’re just happily charging along.
Can we get a bit more information. What country do you live and what zone are you in ? What about pests and such.
Those are so tiny!
Allow Denethor, Steward if Gondor access to that tomato bush.
Yeah really doesn’t look like something id grow. Cool novelty though.
