We've been gone a week, and even though we asked our neighbors to help themselves to the veggies, we came home to an estimated 80-90 pounds of tomatoes to harvest.  This picture was taken after we had already given some away!  We sliced some for eating on the spot, made tomato sauce and handed out the rest.  We are at the peak now, but we'll be easily harvesting 50 pounds a week through August before it tapers off.

Yesterday I took a bucket full to church to set out, they were gone in record time.  The Fellowship Committee takes turns serving a light lunch to the congregation after the last service.  People bring in their excess backyard produce to share.  Lemons, apricots, peaches, cucumbers and tomatoes are highly sought after!

The tomatoes here are all heirloom varieties and are grown completely organic.  We start them from seed in January in a greenhouse my husband and son built 20 years ago.  This year I was timid to start the seeds because of our drought.   In the spring we bought nursery center plants when we heard rationing was not going to be as restrictive as we had feared.  We are growing half as many plants as we did last year and are able to cut down on our water consumption quite a bit.  We have a good sized sunny plot in our back yard that we have designated as our vegetable garden.   We both have a lot of time and love to putter in the garden tending the flowers and the vegetables, but the tomatoes have really become my husband's domain.  He takes great pride in choosing the seed varieties but let's me get them started.  Once they are ready for planting outdoors he takes over.  He will spend at least an hour a day with them, but once the tomatoes are harvested he leaves the rest to me.  We are happy with sliced tomatoes and salt, but there's always sauce to be made.

If you've never made homemade tomato sauce, my recipe will leave you swooning.  And it's by far the easiest way to make it, and I know, I've tried dozens of ways.  Here's the recipe:  Homemade Roasted Tomato Sauce.