The Tomato King

Last year, Mac said he wasn't going to plant so many tomatoes.  This was after our tomatoes were like zucchini in that we couldn't  give them away.  I canned and froze tomatoes and wrapped green ones in newspaper and stored them in the pantry.  We were eating tomatoes at Thanksgiving.  He grows some really great ones in these things he call "growtainers".  They hold two plants each.   He has four of them.  The tomatoes get to be softball and bigger size.  They make great sink sandwiches.  He has the makings for  four more of these growtainers out there.  Okay, so that's eight tomato plants already bearing.  But wait!  He has nearly an acre  planted in melons, beans,  Armendian melons (a great cucumber), eggplant and peppers...we have strawberries (still putting on fruit)  and YES we have TOMATOES.  There are Celebrity,  Mortgage Lifter (three different varieties) and lord knows what else.  He even  has some grafting stock to try grafting.  Like we don't have enough already.    I saw this little marvel  of a gadget on The Price is Right.  It was called a Tomato Press.  Okay, so lots of you already knew about this thing, but I didn't.  So that weekend, I used it for the second time.  I put on a big pan of boiling water and started blanching the  baskets and baskets of tomatoes that were sitting on every available space in the kitchen and dining room.  I just plopped the tomatoes, skin and all, into the hopper and started turning the handle.  Out poured lovely tomato sauce.  I put the skin and seed  back through and got more juice...I worked for nearly three hours and ended up with ten quarts of lovely tomato's for use in sauces of  all kinds.  And it made a pretty good juice, too.    Last year, it went like this: I had just spent two hours watering the garden.  I  watered the fruit trees and all the tomatoes, the  Strawberries and the eggplant. I watered the peppers (bell and HOT) and the flowers even got some attention for a change.  Done  with the front, I turned the hose over to Mac and came inside for a cup of coffee!   Mac was down in the big garden watering .  I went down to take him a cold drink and he was shaking his head.  "What's up?" I asked him.  He looked around at the 80+ Tomato plants (including the three he had planted on Saturday) and said "I'm not going to plant so many tomatoes next year."   I  nodded wisely, but a mental eye roll was what was going on in my head.  Yep, I've heard that before!  Right  now, at this very  second he is going through a box of seeds he saved from last year.  They are tomato seeds.  I give up.