This thread is in response to questions on another tomato thread about growing tomatoes for canning as canned tomatoes and sauce and for dehydrating. I chose to answer this one in its own thread so the info will be easier to find later in forum searches.
I hope the others of you who can/dehydrate tomatoes and who make canned tomatoes, sauce and salsa will describe for the original poster (Laspasturas on the Tomato List thread) which tomatoes you use for canning and drying and how many plants you plant in order to get the vast quantities needed to make canned tomatoes, sauce, salsa and 'sun-dried' tomatoes, without the sun, of course.
ROMA/PASTE/PLUM TYPES VS. STANDARD SLICER/BEEFSTEAK TYPES; There is a common misconception that you 'must' or 'should' use paste-type tomatoes because they are meatier and cook down more quickly. While that is true, their flavor is pretty bland compared to many of the amazing heirloom tomatoes available, and a lot of the hybrids that are good for fresh eating are also good for cooking.
I generally mix together both paste types and slicing types when I'm making sauce, canned tomatoes or salsa. If I have the right amounts, I'll use a 50-50 blend but I also make batches that are 100% heirloom tomatoes. My all-time favorite tomato sauce is one that's a blend of Black Krim, True Black Brandywine, Indian Stripe, Cherokee Purple and and other black or purple or pink heirloom toms. The flavor is indescribeably good.
The type of tomato is least important if you are making salsa because your stronger flavor is going to come from your peppers. I'll use all paste/plum types in salsa if I have them because they are fairly irrelevant--they are just the 'base' for the stronger flavor from the peppers, onions, tomatotilloes (if used), etc. and if you're making fresh salsa (as opposed to canned salsa), the salsa from all paste/plum types is less watery.
I grow a lot of tomato plants every year and harvest a huge amount of tomatoes and I still worry I won't have enough to do all the sauce, salsa, canned tomatoes, etc. that I want to put up. I was wanting to quantify the amount of tomatoes needed, so pulled some numbers from the NHCFP website to detail how many lbs. of tomatoes it takes to complete a batch or sauce or canned tomatoes. (It always takes more than you think it will.) Here goes;
One bushel basket of tomatoes = approx. 53 lbs.
FOR CRUSHED TOMATOES (no added liquid): approximately 22 lbs. of tomatoes will give you a canner load of 7 quarts, or 14 lbs. will give you a canner load of 9 pints.
So, if you use approximately 2 & 3/4 lbs. per quart, you'll get 17 to 20 quarts of crushed tomatoes from a bushel basket of tomatoes.
FOR SPAGHETTI SAUCE (with or without meat):
30 lbs. of tomatoes will give you a canner load of 9 pints.
FOR WHOLE TOMATOES OR TOMATO HALVES CANNED (if packed in water):
21 lbs. will give you a canner load of 7 quarts, or
13 lbs. will give you a canner load of 9 pints.
so if you average about 3 lbs. of fresh toms per canned quart, a bushel will give you from 16-20 quarts.
FOR A THIN TOMATO SAUCE:
35 lbs. of tomatoes will give you a canner load of 7 quarts
or
21 lbs. of tomatoes will give you a canner load of 9 pints.
FOR A THICK TOMATO SAUCE:
46 lbs. will give you a canner load of 7 quarts
or
28 lbs. will give you a canner load of 9 pints.
So, one bushel of tomatoes will give you from about 7 to 9 quarts of thick sauce.
DRYING TOMATOES: Since tomatoes are mostly water, they dehydrate down to almost nothing. If you start out with 14 lbs. of fresh tomatoes, you'll end up with about 1/2 lb of dried tomatoes if you are drying them down to the proper moisture level. For storage purposes, that 1/2 lb. will take up 2 & 1/2 to 3 pints worth of storage space.
You can dehydrate any tomato you choose.
I started out with Principe Borghese which is the classic Italian variety used for sun-dried tomatoes. In most parts of Oklahoma, we cannot pull up the plant, roots and all, and hang it from the barn rafters to dry. (However, I have done that and fairly successfully in a summer with severe drought conditions that gave us incredibly low humidity and literally no moisture from the sky for most of the summer.) I suspect some places in western OK have low enough humidity and rainfall to dry tomatoes on the pulled-up plant in an average year, but not in a rainy year.
Most of us, though, will have to dry our tomatoes using a dehydrator or a convection oven set to the "Dehydrate" mode if it has one.
The larger the tomato and the higher its water content as a fresh tomato, the longer it will take to dry. You can dry any tomato. One key to success is to cut larger tomatoes to the proper size and to a uniform size so all the tomatoes or tomato pieces dry at about the same rate.
If you want classic sun-dried tomatoes in the Italian style, use paste or plum types like Principe Borghese, any of the San Marzano types (I like San Marzano Redorta of all the SM types I've grown and dried), Viva Italia, Amish Paste, Aunt Mary's Paste, Jersey Devil or Martino's Roma (an especially heavy producer). The heaviest-producing paste tomato I've ever grown was Burpee's Big Mama which produced millions of tomatoes on 6' to 8' tall plants that looked like crap with every foliar disease you can imagine but just kept pumping out tomatoes for months. The flavor of them fresh was only average, but somewhat better when dried (drying intensifies the flavor) and especially if marinated or if you add spices while drying.
CREATING TOMATO RAISINS: You might have noticed on my grow list that I grow an inordinate amount of small, bite-sized cherry, currant, grape and plum-shaped tomatoes. I love them because they are very versatile. Since I garden organically, I can pluck them from the plants and eat handfuls while working in the garden. Sometimes I'll put in a very busy day in the garden and I'll go outside right after breakfast and not really stop working long enough to eat a meal until after sunset, but that's OK--I survive on oodles of tomatoes and glasses of tea, gatorade and water flavored with Crystal Lite. You can toss handfuls of bite-sized tomatoes into salads and, of course, you can dehydrate them.
I dehydrate them in batches ranging from 300 or 400 to about 900 at a time. I've never kept track of how many I dehydrate in a given year, but clearly thousands. After they are dehydrated, I pack them into zip-lock freezer bags and store them in the freezer. You don't have to store them in the freezer if you dehydrate them down to the proper moisture level, but I have the space so I do it.
To eat them, you can toss handfuls of them into salads, soups, stews, meat loaf, casseroles, etc. straight from the bag. You can eat them straight out of the bag in their somewhat raisin-like dehydrated state, or you can put a handful of dried bite-sized tomatoes into a cup, add water and let them rehydrate for a few minutes before you eat them fresh as a snack or tossed into a salad.
Calculating how many tomato plants you'll need is the hardest part and it is almost impossible to do it with plants that are 'new to you' because you have no idea how many tomatoes to expect from a given variety. It also would vary depending on how much sauce or canned tomatoes you want to put up.
For example, if you want to have enough canned tomatoes (or sauce or salsa or all of them) to last until the next year's harvest, you have to figure out how many times a week or month you want to use those products, and then figure out how many bushels it would take to make that many pints or quarts, and then figure out how many plants it will take to give you that many bushels. I don't do all those calculations...instead, I just guess, but I have endless space (as long as I am willing to improve the soil which is horrid red clay and fence it in to keep the deer and rabbits from eating the plants) and when I run out of space, I plant in containers.
I generally plant between 100 and 140 plants in the spring planting and then maybe another 40 more for the fall garden. Of 100 plants, at least 20 or 25 will be the plants that produce bite-sized tomatoes so that I will be able to dehydrate tons and tons of them AND have all we want to eat fresh during the growing season. (I eat tomatoes all day long....at every meal and as snacks when I have fresh ones.) Another 30 plants will be those intended mostly for canning, and the rest are either slicers or beefsteaks or 'new to me' which I classify in my head as 'experimentals' and I don't expect big yields from them the first year, although I am thrilled if I get big yields.
During the recent droughts experienced in Love County (most recently from August 2007 through April 2009, and before that in 2005-2006, and before that in 2003), my plants weren't producing enough for me to can/dry/eat fresh (and freeze!) and I was growing mostly heirlooms because of their unique flavors. In order to get larger harvests, I have dropped some heirlooms that are poorer producers in our heat and have added some hybrids that are very heavy producers (notably Jetstar, Ramapo, Supersonic, Moreton, Prime Time, Scarlet Red and Red Defender) and that has enabled me to can, freeze, and dry pretty much all I want in addition to having all we want/need for fresh eating from April through November or December.
I don't keep written records, but from memory, I think I "put up" the following from the 2009 garden;
Dehydrated bite-sized tomatoes; approximately 5 or 6 gallons. (I dehydrated a lot more, but I eat handfuls of them as soon as they come out of the oven so a lot of them never make it out of the kitchen and into the freezer.)
Canned As Salsa: approximately 65 pints
Canned As Multi-purpose Sauce: 12 pints
Frozen As Tomato Puree OR Whole Tomatoes: approx. 30 quarts. (This was not enough. I cook with them a lot and need at least 45 quarts.)
That sounds like a lot, and it was, but we also ate fresh tomatoes from April or May (seems like last year's first ripe toms were late and may have been in May instead of the usual April) through December virtually daily, and I made a batch of sauce almost weekly, which uses up a lot of tomatoes.
I hope this info is helpful.
Depending on what the weather does, I'm hoping for 160 plants this year and I want to be able to make our own catsup and barbeque sauces without cutting back on how many we eat fresh.
Remember, though, that this is Oklahoma and our success or lack of such success with tomatoes in any given growing season is highly dependent on the weather...which is difficult at best and horrid at other times.
Finally, this is a really long thread but I have to add two lines from the chorus of a wonderful song, and it is this:
"There's only two things that money can't buy,
That's true love and home grown tomatoes."
Dawn
dannigirls_garden
farmgardener
Related Professionals
Rocky Mount Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers · Johnson City Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers · Keene Landscape Architects & Landscape Designers · Ocala Landscape Contractors · Lake Charles Landscape Contractors · Baltimore Landscape Contractors · Chillicothe Landscape Contractors · Nashua Landscape Contractors · Clearlake Landscape Contractors · San Jose Landscape Contractors · Vicksburg Accessory Dwelling Units · Longview Accessory Dwelling Units · Phoenix Accessory Dwelling Units · Fort Collins Accessory Dwelling Units · Salt Lake City Accessory Dwelling Unitslaspasturas
Okiedawn OK Zone 7Original Author
okie-girlgardener
Okiedawn OK Zone 7Original Author
tracydr
Okiedawn OK Zone 7Original Author
cjlambert
Okiedawn OK Zone 7Original Author