Home Dried Tomatoes

Our garden has finally taken off. In the last two weeks we've picked eggplants, lemon cucumbers, green and golden zucchini, peppers, basil, and yes, many many heirloom tomatoes. I believe Neil has already been bragging about our latest haul over at microecos, but I'm going to show this picture too.

We are clearly overwhelmed. Especially since Neil is now off in China eating soaked chicken feet, leaving me with 12 plants worth of ripe tomatoes. Luckily California's Central Valley offers not only the perfect climate for growing vegetables (with, of course, loads of irrigation), but also the perfect one for drying them (for the same reason that we require irrigation). Last summer at the co-op, we turned an old futon into a drying rack by simply replacing the mattress with a door-sized screen. We dubbed this invention "the Fruiton" and it worked quite well once we ant-proofed it by coating the legs with wide bands of tanglefoot.

This year we had to get creative yet again, but this time we ended up with something smaller and simpler. We built a screen that would slide (somewhat) easily into the middle of our clothes drying rack, and then we plopped it into the sunniest spot in our yard. It's working rather well. We slice most of the cherry tomatoes we harvest in half, lay them face up on the rack, and in a few days they're dry.


The dry tomatoes go into a bag in the freezer to be eaten at a time when our tomato jungle is only a distant memory. It's so difficult not to eat them right off of the screen! I've definitely found that the cherry tomatoes are easier to work with than slices of larger tomato, which can sometimes end up too thin and dry or thick and messy. The promise of a gallon bag of sun dried tomatoes in the freezer definitely makes the prospect of fall and winter less distressing. Of course, I love the rainy season and the greens that come with it, but a little mention of the summer sun will certainly be welcome.