Tomatoes are ready to be harvested!

Tomatoes must be the easiest vegetable to grow in our own gardens, they don't require loads of space and they produce a lot for every plant plus, they can be used in various ways.

It's cheap and more important: it's great to see mother nature's wonder, getting from seedlings to full grown plants.

Around 15 May every year, I start with seeding inside the house because it's still too cold outside in The Netherlands, 8 weeks later they're ready to be planted outside and around that time there is no risk on sub zero nights anymore.

In roughly five months, these little guys...

To temporary cups so they have more room for their roots to develop, on the right I have marigolds, they are perfect companions for tomatoes.

And on to their final place in my small garden.

To see these two pictures in comparison is crazy, the marigolds have grown so big as well this year!

After I seeded inside the house there were also 'wild' tomato plants in my garden, from fallen tomatoes last year so now I had way too many plants, on the other side of our backyard we recently made a new part with plants instead of concrete tiles so there was enough room to put them but they got completely overgrown and now I have a lot of tomatoes, it's a real mess on that side and it's not the prettiest I know, but look at how many!

I have to make sure the small regular plants we've put there don't get overgrown and maybe damaged.

This year I also planted another kind of tomato, a lemon tomato, it just looks funny but tastes the same. But the yield is a lot lower.

So what to do with all the tomatoes? With most of them, I make soup, and lately I'm doubling the ingredients on my own recipe, to make 3.5 liters of soup with 2 kilo's tomatoes.

I think home made soup tastes a lot better than the one we buy in cans from the stores and I bet it's a lot healthier as well.

So it went from this...

To this, in about one and a half hour with the help of my kids, it's nice to make soup together with them. 🙂

In the next weeks we will probably make a couple of liters more soup and use the rest to make pasta sauce with.

One more thing to do...

A very important step, to extract the seeds and dry them so I can start the whole cycle again next year!

😍

Thanks for stopping by!