Red Fire Farm Tomato Festival

This past Saturday was the Red Fire Farm Tomato Festival - I had been excited about it all summer and it turned out to be a lot of fun! It was much more crowded than we had been expecting, which made things a bit hectic, but overall we had a good time.

Inside their barn were all different varieties of tomatoes (see the photos below) and other produce for purchase. We had fun wandering around looking at everything. We bought several melons and a bag of apples. The apples (Macintosh) have been quite tasty - we haven't cut the melons yet, but the ones we tasted at the festival were delicious (we bought one Peace Yellow melon and one small watermelon).


They had food vendors, including Black Sheep Deli which used their veggies in what they were offering. I had wanted to get a quesadilla, but they were out by the time we got to the front of the line. :( Oh well, the bruschetta was very tasty! Dan got grilled tomatoes, which were very good as well. I also got an apple smoothie and an AMAZING lemon almond cookie from El Jardin Bakery.

We waited in line for a very long time to taste lots of different heirloom tomatoes. The tasting was held inside their new building covered with solar panels - it's really a neat concept! As you can see from the second photo below, they will be able to generate half of their electricity from these panels once it's finally hooked up!


Although we would have liked to taste ALL of the kinds they were offering, they had a lot of trouble keeping up with the demand. I would say that we still tasted about 30 or 40 tomato varieties, and I'm not sure that I would have been able to eat that many more anyway. My favorite varieties were Matt's Wild Cherry, Juliet, and Favorita. Although my three favorites were red tomatoes, we also tried some that were green, orange, or brown. It was quite an experience!


After tasting the tomatoes, we had the opportunity to pick some veggies of our own - as CSA members, we are entitled to a certain amount of each kind of vegetable the farm grows. We hadn't had an opportunity to get to the farm before now, so we were excited to pick a lot of stuff!

We picked several pints of tomatoes, two pints of green beans, and ground cherries:


If you've never tried ground cherries, they are quite different from what I was expecting. They are ripe when they fall off the plant, and to eat them you peel off the husk and then eat the small yellow fruit inside. I actually thought they tasted more like grapes than cherries. Dan liked them more than I did!


We also had the chance to pick our own flowers - I'd never done that before, and it was a lot of fun creating our own bouquet. We were allowed to pick up to 7 Sunflower stems, and up to 10 of the other varieties. I've been enjoying our arrangement all week...