Last Saturday almost 200 members and their guests arrived on the farm with one purpose in mind.. to cook tomatoes. They started arriving at 10.15 am and within an hour many of the tables were claimed. We had to double people up and find extra tables to accommodate everyone and the extra cooking gear they brought this year. Each year this seems to become a more serious enterprise. People learn from each other and they bring bigger pots, more of them and lots of canning jars. For our part we love this, it is intense and we have the tomatoes for them to can. I asked Jose and the crew to fill 200 trays with tomatoes, one's that we could not sell due to some slight blemish or nick. We believe we had about 2,400 lbs in the truck and at the end of the day just six trays remained unused.
It is not all work as Molly prepared fixings for Bloody Marys and members shared their homebrew. About 2pm the first people were ready to can. We own four pressure canners and we showed them how use them. By the end of the evening there was a production line in operation.
As night fell Eric and Andrew lit the campfire and those members remaining set up camp. In the morning we prepared eggs and tortillas for breakfast. By noon everyone was back on the road after raiding the Strawberry field for the last of the summer berries.
These events are so much fun webelieve that after visiting the farm members get a much better insight into what we are really about here at Eatwell Farm... Nigel