Joe's Tomatoes This one will have to be quick because Garrett is crying, but given that I haven't posted in 9 months, this is long given my recent trends.

So, Friday, I harvested 9.1 pounds of delicious tomatos from my organic garden. I figure that at $1.79/ pound, I had made a striking economic case for home gardening. The tomatoes were delicious, close to home, and had a market value of around $16.

"But what do you do with 9 pounds of tomatoes?" you might ask, as indeed I did. Well, they were nice, a labor of love, and all that, so spent an hour, and $3 worth of natural gas (total guess) to convert them into canned tomatoes. The damn shame of it all is that a quart of canned tomatoes (of which I now have 3) is only worth about $2.59. I had enough tomatoes to make 3 1/2 quarts, but you can't "can" half quarts, so I also am long a 1/2 quart of half processed tomatoes, which is worth almost as much as a Wendy's ketchup packet.

My home gardening adventure now has me long $7.91 of stored food, for a net value of $4.91 (remember the gas spent boiling 4 gallons of water for 90 minutes).

Not bad. The seeds were free, I love playing in the garden, I got 5 more pounds ready to harvest and I have all the fresh tomatoes I want to eat for at least 2 months of the year.

Seeds for sale, $0.99 a packet plus delivery. I guarantee that these are good tomatoes, since I got them from a little old lady in Bedford, PA who has been grwoing them for 50 years. She didnt' even know what kind they are, but astutely observed,
"They are ugly but really tasty."

And they are. You'll get lots of neighbors saying things like,
"Is that a cross between a pepper and a tomato?

To which you might reply,
"Yes, I feed them to a herd of wild jackalope that I keep for their milk"  ¶ 7:22 PM 1 comments