There is nothing like a homegrown tomato for intense flavour!
As Mario Batali, Italian chef and multiple restaurant owner says
‘You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook’s year. I get more excited by that than anything else.’ Mario Batali
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This year, I have the most beautiful tomatoes. They started producing early, in late spring with the cherry tomato I had nursed through the winter, then the Romas came on and now I have tomatoes from one of the larger varieties. This year they have all been perfect and lots of them.
I don’t very often try to keep any of my produce any longer than the season. We eat it and then wait until the next year for more, however, having lots of lovely tomatoes and a taste for Italian food, I decided I would keep some for later.
Feeling a bit lazy, I simply boiled down the tomatoes, blended them and then froze the result in muffin trays, storing them individually in small sandwich bags ready for use as a tomato base. 
The smell of these little bliss bombs is absolutely amazing and like the tomato chutney I made a year or so ago, will remind me of what tomatoes should taste like during the year.
Since tomatoes can sometimes be a bit tricky if you strike a bad year for fruit fly or disease, and I don’t use non-organic sprays or fertiliser, I sometimes get a little equivocal about growing them, but when I have a good year there is no doubt in my mind why I persist in planting them every year. I always have cherry tomatoes though,as they insist on planting themselves and do tend to be fairly disease resistant.
I’ll leave you with the quote below which aptly sums up my feeling about store bought tomatoes.
The federal government has sponsored research that has produced a tomato that is perfect in every respect, except that you can’t eat it. We should make every effort to make sure this disease, often referred to as ‘progress’, doesn’t spread.
Andy Rooney
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June means water chestnuts and this last year I tried something new. I used my old horse trough to hold the buckets with the soil, topping the trough up much less often than I need to with individual buckets. I’m not sure whether it was that or that I used a course potting mix to blend with the soil I already had from the year before, but I got a higher proportion of nice, large chestnuts. Less peeling for more crunch.
Garden Path Food 