this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Most people with home gardens have so much produce that they can't even give it away lol. I grew tomatoes last year and it was all I could do to keep up with three plants in the late summer.
I grow tomatoes because they taste infinitely better than what you can buy.
Yes, I end up with more tomatoes than I can consume. For about one month. For about 8 months of the year if I want fresh tomatoes I have to buy them still.
Why don't you can and freeze your extra tomatoes?
Why do you think I don't?
I'm just confused about how you can have more tomatoes than you could possibly eat during grow season, but still have to buy tomatoes for 3/4 of the year
They said they have to buy them if they want fresh tomatoes, not just in general. ie frozen isn't fresh
I said fresh tomatoes. You can't make a salad with frozen tomatoes.
What, everyone loves crunchy salad
If I don't crack a tooth eating a salad, it wasn't a good salad.
You don't make friends with salad
Because you said you buy them from the store off-season.
I said fresh tomatoes.
You don't make a tomato salad with frozen tomatoes.
Not with that attitude.
But no, really, you made the right call here.
Fight fight fight!
We can have a UFC match at the white house. It'll be awesome. Wait…
I wonder, could you freeze a tomato salad? I make mine with a ton of oil and vinegar (plus they are sliced, so a ton of tomato juice) to the point where it’s almost like a soup. I’ve never tried but I wonder if that would freeze ok.
It would not. If you want to stick it in a freezer, you’d have to displace all the water with anti-freeze first, otherwise mush. Bonus, antifreeze is delicious. A tasty last meal!
If it were possible and safe to freeze raw tomatoes for salads, you would have seen packages of them in your grocer's freezer. If you're willing to use them for soup/stew, here's how to do it without making anyone sick:
https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/freeze/vegetable/freezing-tomatoes/
There's links on the page for a lot of other garden vegetables as well.
I was thinking I could freeze the salad after making it. Maybe I make my tomato salads different than others here. I use so much vinegar and oil it’s practically a soup. And soup freezes, so I’m thinking this would work. (I am not thinking of freezing whole fresh tomatoes, if that’s what people are wondering.)
Here's something else I found, looks like you can freeze the tomatoes in their skins, and then slip the skins off and turn the still-icy flesh into gazpacho. Might be an easier way to go, if you decide you like the salad-soup. https://ucanr.edu/sites/default/files/2019-10/312322.pdf
I get it, but it's really gonna be soup after you freeze and thaw it. Might develop a different flavor profile too. And if you keep it any real length of time, even frozen, you could be growing bacteria because they're not dead just slowed down. Read up on safe techniques on the website. And try freezing one portion of your salad for a few days, (that's at least as safe as leaving it in the fridge) then thaw it and see if it's going to be worth the trouble.
The information was never withheld. It was never asked for.
...still, tho. That whole back and forth for one gag?
Learn canning, return to the Old Ways
But we've abandoned germ theory, so it'll be more interesting. Spicy canning.
You still need to seal out the ghosts who fart mold spores
If you decide you want to save on canned tomatoes for pasta and use the cash to buy winter salad tomatoes, here's the safe way to freeze some of your extras: https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/freeze/vegetable/freezing-tomatoes/
How large is your garden mate? Or alternatively how bad are you at giving produce away? My grandparents have quite a large garden and have never had issues with too much stuff
I wonder, do they can stuff as well? Thats the only way to fully utilize a large gardens produce I think. And yes, I did eat all those tomatoes.
They sure do. Freeze a lot of it as well. Leeks, raspberries, drying spices, making cherry/apricot kompot, making marmelade.....
The only thing they complained about this year has been too many cherries. I'd know I had to pick like ⅓ of them.
It's really quite a blessing to have people with such a wealth of knowledge about gardening in the family. It takes a lot of seasons to learn how to be so good at it.
My dad has all sorts of fruit trees and vegetables, I'm over here now trying to keep a rosemary alive, its supposed to me super resilient but it keeps drying up so I water it but maybe the clay dirt is too much for it.
Poor thing has been planted and removed like 5 times due to different house projects. Its like as soon as I plant it all of a sudden they want to use that space
I’ve seen rosemary grow in the desert without needing much other than an automated lawn (drip) sprinkler, on a timer like 3(?) times a week?
wild ones are likely evolved to grow in that environment over cultivated domestic variety, probably more robust.
We cooked with it. It was maybe a bit more robust (so slightly thicker, harder) but it had all the same flavor. Maybe even better, fresher than what I was used to.
My favorite was with potatoes and lamb.
we have a loquat tree(30+years from parents old house) from a layering, it produces alot of fruits, the bees go nuts for the flowers.
Definitely! For example, a zucchini plant might give you a fruit per day for about 3 weeks, which is more than my family can eat. The options for us then are a) canning such as zucchini relish (highly recommend!) or b) grate it and freeze it for future baking (zucchini bread, egg bites, etc.)
One tomato plant can be too many for a family of 4. You don’t need a large garden to have too many tomatoes (or zucchini)
What kind of monster tomato plants are you growing? We are a family of 5 and we have 10+tomato plants which often don't feel enough.
IDK we just randomly pick various varieties and one of them always goes crazy
Depends on what you grow.
I had a half acre, and something like tomatoes means you have to can them because you can't eat them all once they are ready, and a pear tree that would produce wheel barrows full for weeks so I had to start brewing Perry.
But in the city with only a 10x10 plot it was pretty slow going except for cherry tomatoes...those grew like wildfire up and over the fence etc. So many we had to give them away.
I feel so seen. I ended up making pizza sauce with all of my tomatoes. I would have homemade pizza about once or twice a month, and that is after using as many tomatoes as I could for sandwiches. In my experience, I would say 3 plants is just before the threshold of "too many".
That's true, but it's also nowhere near enough to live on.
They get a huge batch of something all at once, and then it's a scramble to eat it, give it away, pickle it, can it, etc. But, the total number of calories produced throughout the season isn't enough to even keep one person alive.
Timing is hard. They product like mad in a very short window.
Canning is a layer of hell.
Freeze dryers are slow, expensive and consume a lot of electricity.
If I had the time/space, I'd stagger my planting, start it indoors, start another batch on time and another late.
I live in a town house but I don't actually have a grassy backyard, just a small shared deck. I've filled it with as many planter boxes as I can but last year I was only able to get two tomatoes to grow and both were stolen by squirrels 🥹
Lol yeah, I have dozens of tomatoes sitting out there on the vine right now because we can't eat them fast enough.
You probably could if it was all you had
sure but you don't have tomatoes all year, only a short time, even if you bottle some.
Being self reliant is mostly impossible if you cant also hunt and forage No ones growing their own wheat for example to make their own bread, let alone collecting the salt they need as well.
we lived off grid for a decade with a massive garden, chickens, ducks, heaps of fruit trees, made our own compost etc
i would go for herbs and spices instead maybe that would be worth the effort
It's a weird split. I've tried to have a garden and would get like five fruits.
I can't get anything to grow because the dumb animals keepnwating everything, despite my efforts.
I was about to say. Everyone I've ever known who grew tomatoes always had significantly more than they could personally use.
My mom fills an upright freezer with salsa and tomato sauce from like 5 plants each year.