If you haven’t already gathered from my previous posts (examples: 1, 2, 3), I really love tomatoes. And over the past couple of years I’ve made it my mission to make sure that I never run out of tomatoes.

There are two parts to my infinite tomato formula.

(Year Round Tomato Supply) + (Annual Replication of Favourite Tomatoes) = Infinite Tomatoes

I want an endless supply of tomatoes, not just during the abundance of the late summer, but also during the long dearth between harvests that comes with living in Canada. And as a “tomato connoisseur”, I love trying all kinds of tomatoes. Red, green, yellow, orange, pink, white, purple, black – large, medium, small, cherry, paste – etc. And I collect my favourites by saving their seeds.

I’m tackling the infinite tomato formula in two posts and debated which part of the formula to start with. I thought about which came first, the tomato or the seed? (I’m guessing evolution means it was the seed?) And I thought about what I do first when the small window of tomato season opens (but I tackle both components of my infinite tomato formula simultaneously). But I settled on first laying out a strategy to have delicious tomatoes for a year and my next post will cover how to have tomatoes forever.

There are a few different ways I’ve found to have a year-round supply of tomatoes even when summer is long over.

Extending Fresh Tomatoes

At the end of the summer there are still green tomatoes on the plant. By picking them before a frost and laying them between sheets of newspaper or putting them in a paper bag they’ll slowly ripen.  There are a few heritage varieties out there (with easy-to-decipher names like “Good Keeper” and “Long Keeper”) that store really well. A couple years ago I had a few tomatoes make it all the way to December.

Freezing

It is a fast and easy way to preserve tomatoes. Basically for plain tomatoes all you have to do is blanche them, bag them, and freeze them (instructions: http://www.instructables.com/id/Freezing-summer-tomato-crop/). We limit our freezing to our homemade pizza sauce (because we don’t have a pressure canner yet). After whipping up the sauce we freeze it in individual portions. The disadvantage for freezing is that space is limited (and for us is taken up by berries and Wilbur).

Dehydrating

Electric dehydrators have made drying food easy, convenient and the fairly compact design means that it can work in apartments. While we don’t own a dehydrator, my parents own two (and my dad always grows more tomatoes than he can use). So every year Jim and I get a box of dried tomatoes from my parents that we can use for pizza, sauces and soups throughout the winter.

Canning

This is the approach that we take for preserving most of our tomatoes. The jars can easily be stored in a closet but also are great decorations. Over the past couple of years we’ve done whole tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, plain tomato sauce, tomato paste, salsa and ketchup. If you’re interested in trying canning it is a good idea to have someone with experience walk you through the process the first time or get a book with detailed instructions and recipes (we like “The Complete Book of Home Preserves”). Basically there are two types of canning: the boiling water method (for high acid foods) and the pressure canner method (for low acid foods). Tomatoes are right of the edge of being acidic enough for the boiling water method and to be safe additional acid like lemon juice or vinegar needs to be added. The reason we freeze our pizza sauce is because we add enough other ingredients that are low-acid (like onions, peppers, garlic) that we can’t use the boiling water method. This year we’re doing 2 bushels of tomatoes over 2 weekends (1 down, 1 to go) and that should be enough to get up through the year.

And finally, you’re likely wondering what preserving a year’s worth of tomatoes and having them stored in various forms throughout our one bedroom apartment has to do with community. First, they are the foundation of many great meals with friends and family, plus they can make a great gift or contribution to a potluck. We’re also supporting our local farming community buy buying our tomatoes directly from them and carrying on a tradition of preserving that was commonplace not that long ago. And finally, I believe for our communities to be resilient in a future where we’ll have to deal with the consequences of peak-oil and climate-uncertainty, it is a good idea to have a wide variety of skill-sets including those that can keep us fed year round.