Gifts from the garden

While the autumn cleaning of our garden is still on my to-do list, I would love to look back at the last summer weeks that surprised us with so many more vegetables than we expected. My favourite vegetable to grow must be tomatoes. They come in various shapes, many colours and different flavours, and I love to try a few new varieties each year to experiment with them in the kitchen. This year, I planted 11 varieties, and about 35 plants. It might sound like a lot to some of you while others will say that it's not enough, but truth to be told, you never know with tomatoes. If it's a good year, you'll get an abundance out of a few plants, and if it's a bad year, you can have 60 plants and still won't have enough. It's been a good year for us. I made sauces for pasta, lasagne, and pizza, a few jars of sun-dried tomatoes, tomato salt, and we ate fresh tomatoes almost every day. At some point, I was getting desperate as I didn't have any more jars and didn't feel like eating tomatoes yet again. There are still some green ones and not enough time for them to change colour, so I might be canning green salsa too. Let's see!  ---- This pinkish variety was one of my favourites this year. They are a bit bigger than cherry tomatoes, and perfect for bruschetta. I hope I don't have here any angry Italians though. I know that this is not the right variety for bruschetta, but it's so so good!  ---- Black Opal tomatoes are becoming a tradition in our garden. They are black with deep orange spot at the bottom when they are ripe. They are perfect raw, but I also like them in sauces.  ---- This variety is used for traditional tomato/pepper sauce that we make for winter in Slovakia. I was blessed with many of them this year, so I don't have to take any jars from my mom 😊  ---- This variety is similar to Black Opal, only they turn deep purple instead of black. They are great for sauces because they are meaty, so they don't require long time for cooking.  ---- This variety is called 'Woman's breast', and I only planted it because the tomatoes should have been pink. I don't know why, but mine were orange. They are sweet and I enjoyed them on bread. They don't have many seeds, and reminded me of persimmon in terms of texture.  ---- These golden pears really are golden. I only had 3 plants, and harvested kilos and kilos of those little yellow jewels. I have a few jars of sun-dried golden pears, only because I loved the colour and thought that they would look good on some dishes. I've never seen yellow sun-dried tomatoes before.   --- Look how cute they are... When I think about me growing up and hating tomatoes, I do not recognize that person anymore. I couldn't even smell them without gagging and now I can't wait to plant new seeds for the next season. ![9.jpg](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/plantfuljourney/EoiXCWDoe2CybryzjD2NTFKUpBBiwHAxd5jMHsp […]