Enough Tomatoes?

I’ve been packing the empty pork freezer with tomatoes:

My rough calculation is approximately 50 gallon zip bags. I have room for maybe a dozen more in the door. Ali and her little guy were over yesterday and I told her to help herself to the tomatoes left on the vines. I am going to bag up what I have ripening and bring in a few more, but I think I am close to being done. These will sit until after the wedding when I will schedule a marathon week of sauce-making followed by a long vacation weekend. This freezer has to be empty by the end of November.

I know people here who lovingly prune and train their tomatoes to maximize production. I would love to be like those gardeners, but I can’t quite get it together. I go for quantity (I put in 46 plants this year) and hope for the best. That strategy seems to work. My tomatoes produced heavily, even without pruning.

It rained yesterday so I still haven’t painted the ice cream parlor chairs. That will be the first item on the to-do list if it stays dry today. I did re-cover one chair seat. I am not thrilled with the fabric I got, but the outdoor fabric selection at our Joanns leaves much to be desired—mostly large-scale tropical prints, none of which were suitable for small chairs like this, let alone small chairs in a decidedly non-tropical location. Oh well. I’ll cover these with what I have and if I find something I like better in the future, I can always re-do them.

I’ve cleaned up the sewing room(s) and put away everything except the black fabric for sashing the rows of the Noon and Night quilt and a few other small projects. I picked up the Warm Window insulation for the shades yesterday and will get those cut out, too. They’re just rectangles with straight seams so they’ll be easy to put together.

Cleaning and organizing. I feel like the squirrels who have been busy stashing pine nuts in the woodshed. Lila likes to watch them from the kitchen door.