Tomatoes - Tomatoes - Tomatoes

The weather this Christmas has been very unseasonable, rain, rain and rain. Christmas Eve was hot and beautifully sunny. The picture below is my little gathering from the garden, but after lunch on Christmas day, the weather changed and it had been very damp ever since.

I only planted three tomatoes plants this year as I don't have much space and didn't want to end up with tons of tomatoes, good plan you may think, but with all the rain we have had this year year, those three plants have gone berserk, swamping all the other plants and tried to escape next door.

With all the rain the last few days, I haven't been able to get out and pick them, and they are now literally bursting out of their skins, so this morning with my trusty brolly and I spent half an hour picking off the best of what I could find in this jungle. There are three variety's here, little golden cherry toms, and red berry tom and a large beef tomato. The golden ones have grown right through the rest and are now heading North to the bottom of the garden. As you can see, not much else is getting much chance to grow!!

Here are the cherry toms ready to be sun dried in the oven, seems bizarre I know, I usually do them in the sun, but have not seen hide nor hair of it for days.

And here are the big fat beefy toms ready to be made into tomato and chilly jam.

A few hours later the jams nearly done and the toms semi dried with a little tyme and rosemary.

Now I have some little bags of sunshine ready for the freezer to go into pasta and breads and what ever else I can think of. The tomato jam has a really intense flavour, I've never made this before but think it's going to be a winner.

Before I go, remember my little painted pieces I showed you in the last post? they have been made into little needles cases and given as presents at our pre christmas afternoon tea. I think the recipients were happy with them .