I need advice: My garden has been strange this year. Mislabeled plant flats.

[Paper Roses]

I don't have good exposure to start plants indoors. I buy flats at the local nursery.
This year I have had a strange event. Since I have an 'above ground' garden, my planting is limited to a few things. The lettuce and green beans grew great. Basil and Parsley-fine.
The problem is my tomatoes. I think the labels on the flats were wrong.

I bought 3 cherry tomato plants and 2 Big Boy tomato plants.
What I have now is 5 cherry tomato plants. They re doing will but I miss the big tomatoes. Hard to make a BLT with cherry tomatoes. Mislabeled.
I went on line to see what I could do with all these cherry tomatoes. Every page I checked had recipes for roasting them. This is not what I'm looking for. One page told me how to freeze them. I've done that and have a big bag of frozen Cherry tomatoes. More to come as I check daily and pick the ripe ones.

I wonder if I can make spaghetti sauce with these tomatoes without peeling and seeding them, that would not be worth the work. Anyone have any ideas?
I hate to waste but this year has been a disappointment. I'm sure not going to peel and seed about 300 cherry tomatoes.

The drought has been bad here in Mass so I've watered the plants in the early AM. Strange summer for a lot of us. Any ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks,
PR

[Tetrachloride]

1. Put out a call for a trade. my family would have gladly traded

juice tomatoes for cherry tomatoes.

[Ocelot II]

2. Just eat them. I have a big Sweet 100 vine outside my front door

and whenever I walk outside I pick off a few and eat them, they're so nice and sweet - they're good in salads, too, but I don't think they're designed for freezing or cooking.

[Chipper Chat]

3. Big boy is by far my favorite tomato.

But this year I had problems I bought 5 started big boys and they never grew very well some of them had very small tomatoes on them And 2 of them the leaves started turning yellow back in June.
However I had great luck with mortgage lifter early girl golden delicious and lemon boy. Every year my cherry tomatoes come back as volunteers except this year there were none. strange. My biggest success by far were sun sugar small orange tomatoes they are growing all over the place their vines are overtaking my other tomatoes but they are delicious.

[MiHale]

4. The skins of frozen tomatoes...

slips right off when put into warm water, sorry will do nothing for the seeds. I changed the water temperature to warm instead of hot due to the small size of the fruit. Do small batches, have fun!
We do roma tomatoes for saucing easiest way to skin 10 lbs of them.

[MLAA]

5. Good to know! Thanks for the tip 🙂

[notinkansas]

6. If you have tons of cherry tomatoes you could make

sauces with them. Simmer them with whatever you like in your tomato sauce until they are mostly cooked down, then put that through a food mill to get rid of the skins. The sauces freeze very well.

I bought a package of 'carrot seeds' that actually contained stuff I couldn't even recognize. All I know is those seeds were not carrots.

[True Blue American]

8. Perfect!

[True Blue American]

9. What did they look like?

[notinkansas]

10. Just like large leafy stuff.

I'm pretty well acquainted with the stores' produce sections, but whatever those were didn't look like anything I had ever seen before.

[True Blue American]

13. I assume you did not eat them!:)

[Retrograde]

18. +1 on the food mill

I find it removes seeds and skins well snd makes a smoother sauce

[True Blue American]

7. I love the cherry tomatoes. Popping one in you mouth

Tastes like BURST OF FRESH PICKED TOMATO!

My Son brought me out 3 potted tomato plants in pots. I asked him what kind. He answered,” “ Compost tomatoes. They were growing in my compost pile!! Turns out one is a loaded cherry, another long tomato, ( Great for juice.

When they make blackberry or raspberry jam, they cook them, then run them through a strainer. To get rid of the seeds. I always just canned tomatoes, cold pack. Or cook them, put in jars.

[gblady]

11. I made some delicious pasta sauce

Using cherry tomatoes. Roasted them in a baking dish with onions garlic and Italian spices. After they were done, I used my immersion blender to make a smooth sauce, the flavor was wonderful 😋

[True Blue American]

14. Good idea!

[rog]

12. Dehydrator?

A friend gave me several boxes of organic cherry tomatoes and various large tomatoes all at once, right at harvest time. Even though they were in great shape, they were 'rejects', for various reasons, from an organic farm. I was looking for the easiest way to use them all, and bought an inexpensive dehydrator ... used it for the tomatoes, and for my own hot peppers. I had tomatoes and peppers well into this summer! Actually, I still have quite a few super-hot peppers left.

Re: the cherry tomatoes, I just sliced them in half and popped them into the dehydrator.

.rog.

[GreenWave]

15. I leave tomato watering be as soon as they start appearing in good numbers.

to stop them from cracking. Mulch should hold enough water and force the roots downward.

They grow from compost and I put red mulch around them.

This year my Romas have been dried up duds but the early girls and boys have been juicy. (Tray)

Cukes were a disaster with mutants. (Grown from seeds)

Millionaire eggplants to die for! (Tray)

California peppers excelente.

Onions great smell to them. I love sniffing the leftover onions in the new compost bins. (These are called walkers because they "walk "very slowly"but put down new roots!

Goodbye asparagus (crickets eat their roots) but 15 years of solid production and the extremely babied Gojis (not one fruit ever)

Blueberries were underwhelming

Peach tree converted into shade tree

Grapes are the grapes this year!

Strawberries oh baby did they ever proliferate, especially the Sequoias. Thanks you lizard family for munching up the snails there.

Chokeberries. Wonderful juices!

Ouachita blackberries. A subpar performance, or something discovered them.

Pecans should be abundant if the squirrels do not pre-harvest again this year. Same for filberts.

But it is the new kid on the black. The superstar. Loganberry! They snake out like anacondas and where they touch ground they may just create another loganberry plant. Immensely delicious and unknown to birds although I selfishly constructed PVC cages with chicken wire to keep them out.

Oh and I almost forgot the chocolate persimmons next month. I have to get them before that pesky squirrel does.

Zone 8/9 farming! Spices sorry about no mention.

[Bayard]

16. Big tomatoes definitely sub-par this year

Small, not much flavor, and not many of them. Cherries are very abundant, and tasty. What we can't eat, the chickens polish off quickly.

Doesn't use up many cherry tomatoes at once, but it makes a good salad: Combine them with chunks of mozzarella cheese, a little balsamic vinegar and olive oil, and lots of basil.

We have tons of Sweet Passion cantaloupes (SO good!). The first watermelons weren't very good (trying a new type, can't remember the name), but the Ali Baba's are wonderful, as usual. Picked a 31 pounder last week.

We've had some kind of fungus, and worms, taking out our apples the past few years, and lost one tree to the storms. The peaches were terrific, but many were also hit by the fungus. It seems to get everything here, wipes out a lot of the flower garden every year. Doesn't seem to matter how much we spray.

[Kali]

17. I make BLTs with cherry tomatos all the time

the only decent tasting tomatoes in the stores are cherubs. I just cut them into long halves and use them like any sliced tomato, (or dice into quarters or 8ths if they are big for chopped). sure it takes a little more time and a good sharp knife but they taste good and don't drag out of a sandwich and slap you in the chin.

yes you can make sauce or cook with them just fine. if the skins are tough and thick you can pick them out, but no need to seed/peel.

[Retrograde]

21. Alton Brown had a deconstructed BLT on one of his Good Eats shows

basically, panzanella (an Italian bread salad) with lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and a bacon dressing.

[Warpy]

19. You can (and should) make a fresh spaghetti sauce with these

Once California cardboard had cornered the tomato market in local supermarkets, I started to buy cherry tomatoes and use them for spaghetti sauce, homemade ketchup, tomato relishes, etc. because the flavor it so much better than those hard, pink things that have merely stolen the name.

You'll have seeds and skin in your sauces, but you won't mind, the flavor is that good. Just cut them in half and cook them down.

[Paper Roses]

20. Hi Warpy, I was hoping for this advice.

When the rest of the tomatoes are picked and frozen, I'll just cook them up. I've made sauce for years with larger tomatoes, never had to cope with hundreds of these little ones. AND I don't have an immersion blender. Glad to hear that I can cook up a big batch and not worry about the skins or seeds.
Thanks for the advice.

[Warpy]

22. I've never canned them but it shiould work

They have a very bright flavor, so I've used them in fresh spaghetti sauce. They cook down in a flash. It was also nice to be lazy and not peel or seed them (that's just plain nuts) the way I did when I was canning big tomatoes that I grew.

[chowmama]

23. If you like a smooth sauce

and have a food mill, just make the sauce and put it through the mill. The flavor would be excellent.

I like my food mill. It gets all the little skins out of my chili paste (ancho, mulato and pasilla), finds stray seeds I missed and makes a lovely texture. Good for applesauce, too. Cooked with the skins, cores and everything but the stems and blossom ends, it gets out everything I don't want and wastes nothing. (I do peel off the skins by hand after cooking - they come right off.) Pretty rosy color, too.

[eppur_se_muova]

24. I remember a nice little side dish of Brussels sprouts, cherry tomatoes, and pearl onions ...

No recipe, just seemed to be boiled with a little butter for flavor. Nice colors for Christmas, too. Or you could modify this recipe a little: https://cookinglsl.com/balsamic-brussels-sprouts-tomatoes/

There are recipes out there which specifically call for cherry tomatoes; others say "cherry or grape".
They are less juicy than other varieties, which makes them unsuitable for some baked recipes. But cherry fans have found lots of ways to use them.

If you just want to add them to a salad, remember the old trick of stacking a layer of cherry tomatoes between a pair of flat plates, jar lids, etc. and slicing through them all at once. Makes them much easier to pick up on a fork.

You might want to vary the recipe of sprouts to tomatoes in these recipes, since you have so many tomatoes (and Brussels sprouts do cause gas ).

https://vettapasta.com.au/recipes/n/Brussel-Sprouts-with-Spinach-and-Cherry-Tomatoes-/det/1164

https://www.food.com/recipe/cherry-bomb-chicken-with-sauted-brussels-sprouts-on-the-side-110340

[Vinca]

25. I'm a bit north of you and my garden was terrible this year. I blame a combination of

the weather (lack of rain) and maybe not getting enough attention early on because I was recovering from a hip replacement. Yesterday I decided to just let it go for the year. What I get I get. My tomatoes are a huge disappointment. Usually I have them coming out my ears, but there aren't all that many this year. Plus, some kind of small critter made a tunnel under the fence and has been dining on beefsteaks. A few things have done well: basil, both red and green kale, peppers, celery and scallions. Squash and cukes were okay, then the squash bugs turned up and nothing seems to work on them. Maddening.