Final Harvest

This afternoon, I picked what I assume is the last large tomato that I'll harvest this year. A few cherry tomatoes remain on the vine, but they don't count as a harvest, do they? The purple Cherokee joined three others I had picked earlier this week. In their prime, these are great slicing tomatoes and terrific in salads. They are a bit juicy for turning into sauce, but they were kinda rough looking, so it was off to the saucepan for the lot of them.

Two hours of simmering later, they had reduced by about a half.

Not bad for a bunch of compost volunteers.

And while they may pop up again in the compost pile next year, I'm not going to count on it. I decided to save some seeds. Thanks to some tips from GreenGirls, I know how (and why) to remove the gel that surrounds the seeds.