Roma Tomatoes

Start

March 1

Transfer

April 23 with cold frame, May 20 without.

Harvest

End of August

Start seeds indoors in early March. Setup the seedling tray one day before planting the seeds - the wet dirt is easier for them to grow in. Sprouting the seeds in a plastic bag seemed to cause more problems than it solved. Transfer outside after the threat of frost is past. When transferring outside, plant them all the way up to their leaves. Once the plant is 3" tall, remove leaves from the bottom 1". Put up cages early on and when the plant gets large and bends under its own weight, the cages will support the stalk and branches.

In 2012, the leaves on my seedlings turned purple which means they were too cold and having trouble taking up phosphorus. Next year put a towel under them and see if that provides enough insulation. This year they also were devastated by caterpillars (I believe they were cutworms). Need to go out regularly after dark and pick these vermin off.

Canning

20 minutes @ 5psi

To process, cut in half as they ripen and freeze them. When enough collect, remove skins and render sauce. To remove skins get a pot of water boiling, put tomatoes in a wire colander and immerse in the water for a few seconds. The skins just peel off.

2018

Bought a few plants from Home Depot, they did well.

2019

Bought plants from Burpee because I didn't get seeds started. They went in kind of weak and the process was expensive. The orange cherry tomatoes had an amazing yeild. Roma tomatoes did ok. From 16 plant I got 16 pint jars.

2020

Started out strong, got the seeds planted in February, got a small insulated box setup. But the seeds I used were kind of old and not enough sprouted. The insulated box didn't keep them warm enough so growth was a little stunted. When I went to transfer them, the raised beds were rotting and falling apart. It took two weeks to get them replaced with bricks. In that time, some of the plants that got transferred to pots outside died. So from my target of 9 plants per bed, I only ended up with 5 and each bed had one plant on life support, so really closer to 4. The plants were also quite small for getting them planted on 6/14 - a month late.

This turned out to be for the best, 4 plants per garden ended up feeling quite crowded. As of late September I have a good harvest with more to come. I've got about 1 bushel. As I picked them, I threw them in the freezer. The best approach to prepping them was to put a small score in their surface and drop them in boiling water. The skin would peel off quickly. I just boiled the tomatoes down whole, but this is taking a long time because there is a lot of water in them.

For my next batch I'm going to try cutting the step off and halving the tomato before freezing. That should make processing faster.

Cutting them in half worked well. It makes taking the skin off very easy. I've been able to ripen some of them by keeping them in one bowl with a banana and another bowl set on top. I think I'm going to get about 2.5 pint jars per plant.

2021

In 2020 I got about 18 plants in. But that many in the raised beds gets kind of cramped. I'd like to go back to doing them on the roof. But instead of the drip irrigation, I can do bucket wicking. I should keep an eye out for buckets. At HD, these are $3.20 each (x10). Found a local source on Craigslist for $2. Probably paint them black (warmer and no algae growth). I also might want to put bricks or something in them to take up space. I only want to do about 5 this way as a test.

2022

Got these in just a little late (May 5th, direct sow). But