Tomatoes

It's gardening time and I love tomatoes. Unfortunately I do not love gardening and tomatoes do not love me. They are one of those things that cause GERD and so I have to be careful about when I eat them. I guess I could eat them for breakfast and get away with it, but the later in the day the worse they are.

But, for everyone else I have Grow the Best Tomatoes. 36 pages  by John Page. Unfortunately, here I have to just direct you to the site where you can get it. The copyright states that you need written permission to reproduce or store it in a retrieval system, or even send it to anyone. So I don't know why they have it available online, but you can still get it from where I got it, so that's okay.

Another booklet
This booklet (8 pages) is called Growing Tomatoes in the Home Garden, by Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service. Since Oklahoma weather is somewhat dry like Arizona it might work for me here, too. There are other booklets available if you are interested.

These are on page 7 of the above booklet. If you just type the booklet number, for example BAE-1511 into the search it will lead you to a PDF document that you can download.

Here's another good idea.
Upside down tomatoes
This is an awesome idea. I hope you will find a way to accomplish it. I am looking into the bucket tomatoes.

The website link above tells you how to do this.

Why would you want to do this?

• No need to stake. Gravity takes care of the vines so you don't need to, and that's one less thing to worry about.

• No weeding. Well, technically you can get weeds in the top of the bucket, especially if you don't put a lid on it, but it'll be nothing compared to a traditional garden.

• Fewer soil diseases/root rot. Because you'll be using bagged soil and (most likely) changing it every year, you don't really need to worry about disease.

• Better air circulation. Related to both of the above, hanging plants get better air circulation, with means better pollination and overall healthier plants.

• You can grow year-round. If you have adequate light and heating, you can squeeze a full grow cycle into the "off season."
   
  To round off this post  I have a 2 page PDF called Tomatoes: The Overlooked Survival Food from thesurvivalmom.com. She covers how to oven dry tomatoes, how to dehydrate them and how to make homemade tomato powder. Basically, once you have dried them you use a food processor or blender to powder them. She includes recipes for ketchup and salsa.