Last year, when we decided to put in a tiny little garden, we planted four regular tomato plants and four cherry tomato plants. We ended up planting all the tomatoes far too close together in the raised bed, so we only got a handful of tomatoes (mostly Green Zebras) from the regular plants, while the cherry tomato plants kept Richard in a steady supply of lunchbox snacks through most of the summer.

This year when we put in all of our tomatoes, we spread them out more. The four cherry tomato plants went into the raised bed, while the regular tomatoes were planted along the wall of the old garage in the back. They didn’t get as much sun at first, so they didn’t have nearly the same amount of growth spurts the cherry tomatoes went through, but they’ve been picking up pace as the weather has gotten hotter and hotter, and at this point there are enough huge green tomatoes on the vine that I am thinking my hopes of making at least one batch of sauce straight from our garden might actually come to fruition this year.

The cherry tomatoes, however, have gone a bit, well, insane. The bed they are in is ten feet long by four feet wide. They spill over on both of the short sides by at least a foot in either direction, and combined, they take up at least eight feet of the length of the bed. Our cucumber vine is steadily losing ground (which is frustrating, because for a while there, we were harvesting beautiful cucumbers from our garden, and I was happily turning them into cucumber salads and taking big containers of them with me to work for lunch every day). The peppers are still limping along, although we’re watering them a lot more now, so it’s possible that they might still surprise us and produce an actual pepper one of these days. But the cherry tomatoes are doing their level best to bury us in fruit.

The first few harvests we only got a handful; few enough that we could cheerfully report ‘harvested 7 cherry tomatoes today’. But then things got quickly out of hand. The worst of it was earlier this month, shortly after that nasty hot spell we had, when in one week we harvested over eight pounds of the little suckers (yes, we have been weighing them). Oh, and did I forget to mention that we had a ‘volunteer’ tomato plant sprout from the compost heap, and naturally that turned out to be a cherry tomato as well.

There are only so many cherry tomatoes Richard can eat. We’ve tried foisting them on coworkers but unfortunately we both work in small offices. I tried making sauce with them, but peeling cherry tomatoes is pointless, so I had to filter the resulting pulp through my food mill, and it was a long and messy procedure. The sauce was…okay, but not worth all the effort. So one of the reasons why I was just so completely frustrated by the lack of tomato-related info at the Master Preservers demo this month was that I had really been hoping to get some pointers for how the heck to deal with the mountain of cherry tomatoes slowly accumulating in our fridge.

Roasting them in a shallow baking dish with a little garlic and olive oil, and then serving that over pasta, worked out pretty well. But there’s only so much of that we can eat before we’re sick of it. So this afternoon I decided to at least clear out the current overflow, and I canned them.

Four beautiful pints of cherry tomatoes. I canned them whole. They look so pretty in their jars, all the different colors of all the different types of tomatoes (we’ve got purple ones, pinkish peach ones, red pear-shaped ones, big fat round red ones, and green ones with dark yellow skin). Considering the number of still-green cherry tomatoes still lurking in the midst of the massive cherry tomato jungle in our backyard, I suspect I’ll have more than enough to add a few more jars just like these to my pantry shelves.