Our first homegrown tomatoes of the season!

A few weeks ago, I noticed the first of my tomatoes growing on the vine. They were green and striped. I wondered how you tell when green tomatoes are ripe, as I had never grown them before. So, I decided to pick a few and put them on the kitchen windowsill to see what would happen. Low and behold, they started turning red! I had made a mistake… these were NOT green tomatoes…

I went outside and found that the tag red Tigerella Heirloom. I bought about 12 heirloom tomato plants from Allandale Farm this year. I totally regret not taking a picture of the placards they had, describing what each heirloom looked and tasted like. At least now I knew that the Tigerella turns red with yellowish-orange stripes. Allandale has a list of all the tomato varieties they sell… funny enough, this isn’t on the list, but I’m guessing it’s lumped in with the zebras.

You can see in the photos how the tomatos transition from green to red… pretty cool how it goes from green on green, to green on orange, to orange on red.

These little tomatoes are about the size of golfball. I sort of wish I had left them to ripen on the vine (had I known) because I think vine ripened tomatoes taste even better than counter ripened ones. Either way, these were pretty good! Better than any grocery store tomatoes, that’s for sure.

So what did I do with my very first tomato “crop”? I made a BLT of course! Turkey bacon on WW rye bread, for a total of 4-5 points, depending on how many peices of bacon you use and how much low fat mayo.

We’ve also been lucky enough to “harvest” some other crops so far this year…. we’ve had raspberries:

Blackberries:

And, the 5-yo has his own little bean patch… where he’s growing green, yellow and purple string beans. Here he is showing off his first harvest and the chewed up beans in his mouth!