You, my fine readers, are invited to join us in our Tomato Tasting and Harvest potluck here at Dog Island Farm in Vallejo on Saturday, September 6th. We’ll start the tomato tasting around 3pm and serve dinner at 6pm. Bring your favorite homemade dish to share. Bonus points if it’s made from food your raised/grew.
We have 19 varieties of tomatoes that we are growing and would love to share the many flavors with all of you. We also would love your opinions on the tomatoes so will have cards for you to fill out. We do ask for a $3-5 donation for the tasting to cover the tomatoes but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Get a chance to try our heirloom tomato sauce when we fill our big brew pot with ciopinno. We’ll provide the base (from our homegrown heirloom tomatoes), the crab and the bread but we’d like some help. You can choose between bringing a dish to share or bringing a pound of seafood to throw in the pot. If you’re interested in bringing seafood let me know so I can coordinate with everyone.
It’s kid and partner friendly. Got a friend that is into or getting into urban farming or a big fan of tomatoes? Bring them along! Just let us know how many will be joining you.
And like all our other potlucks, to reduce waste we ask that you please bring your own place setting including a glass/mug to drink out of. Let us know if you can join us as soon as you can so we can make sure we have enough seats for everyone.
Register here and the address will be sent to you.
Sounds wonderful. If we weren’t on the other side of the continent we’d definitely try to attend. I hope you’ll share what the winning tomato is. 🙂
Hope your tomato tasting goes well. As Bill requests we hope you share the experience and your winning tomato/es.
Being at the other end of the earth I can only rely on what I have stored at this time of year.
When the frosts hit a couple of months ago my last self sown tommy toe was developing a nice lot of tomatoes, probably about 5Kgs worth. So not to lose them I cut the plant off at ground level and hung it upside down on the veranda and now able to pick a handful of lovely ripe fruit each week. We have had a few -5C frosty mornings with many zero to -3C days too but the plant continues to allow its fruit to ripen.
My other source of tomatoes are the dried ones (in an electric drier powered by pv panels) I made back during the peak of summer. Production was down this year due to drought conditions and probably only dried a bucket full every 3 weeks. These I use in casseroles but they also go well with pizza along with dried capsicum. They give a nice quality taste. They are a nice snack too along with dried apricots, peaches and figs.
My varieties this year include the self sown tommy toe, Grosse Lisse, Rouge de Marmande and mighty red. I just started to sow new seeds yesterday with Marmande first off the block. The others I will sow later in the week include Gross Lisse and Wapsipinicon which will be a first.
About nine years ago I planted 18 different varieties in the one season but now stick to good heavy producers and the odd new one to try.