What’s better than your own tomato harvest?

What can get better than harvesting your own tomatoes?  Taking home someone else’s tomato harvest!  I was cleaning up a client’s garden recently and came across a few grape tomato plants in amongst the perennial flowers and shrubs. I picked them off the frost-bitten vines and left the tomatoes in the sun to dry while I finished working on the garden.  Sun dried tomatoes must need a whole lot of sun to dry them out as these grape tomatoes were still soggy and soft three hours later.  My client didn’t want to bother collecting and cleaning the tomatoes to use in her kitchen, so I brought them home with me.  I shared my bounty with another client that lives next door to the tomatoes…

I took my share of the grape tomatoes home, washed and strained them, then cooked them up in a pasta sauce for dinner…

I sauteed crushed garlic, onions, olives and turmeric in olive oil for the main ingredients, added cooked and drained pasta (gluten-free for my wheat allergy) then stirred in a beaten egg and parmesan cheese to make the sauce creamy.  I seem to use turmeric in just about everything these days, since I read it is a powerful anti-oxidant.  I would have added roasted red peppers if I had some in my fridge to roast that day.  The pasta dish was reasonably good, although I think I left too many green tomatoes in the sauce as it had a bit of a sweet and sour taste.

Free Tomato Plant

I have found many things in a bag of potting (or other types) of soil, but this tomato plant was a surprise.  I first noticed a few leaves poking out of one corner the bag of soil and thought it was a weed as I have encountered many kinds of weeds in bags of soil in my business.  I decided to wait to see what developed and was amazed to see a tomato blossom on the plant a few weeks later.  I left the small amount of soil in the corner of the bag undisturbed so the plant could continue to grow, and sure enough tomatoes have sprouted!  The tomatoes are still small and green and will probably not ripen in the limited sunlight they are growing in, but I will wait a bit longer to see how big they do grow.