Tomato update

My tomato plants are enormous.

Also, I desperately need to weed that garden and get the Gaillardia staked up, but that will be a task for next weekend.

I wasn't expecting these tomato plants to get so big, and the cages I bought are much too small to properly support and restrain them! They're also much too close together, which means that finding and picking the ripe tomatoes is a bit of an adventure. I've had some stinkbug issues, but they seem to only go after the leaves and the ripe tomatoes, so picking the tomatoes just as they're starting to blush has been working well for me. I go tomato picking with a paintbrush to flick away the stinkbugs, because it still completely freaks me out to touch a bug.

Here's my current tomato supply:

My husband has claimed these particular tomatoes in the name of salsa, which he will make tonight.

I've been counting and weighing my tomato harvest since the very first cherry tomato came off the vine, because I'm a dork like that and I want to see how much money I'm saving by growing my own veggies. I grew these from seeds, not from starter plants, but I suspect that once I factor in the cost of the special seed-starting soil and the little pots, it would have been just as economical to buy little seedlings and start from there. But I did this for the challenge of growing something edible from a seed, and I succeeded and I'm proud of myself.