The Wisdom of the Gaucho

Our tomato harvest can include an overwhelming bounty.  Once our freezer is already overflowing with chopped/quartered tomatoes that Alycia has frozen in quart Ziploc bags, and we're filled to capacity with a years' worth of pasta and pizza sauce, we need to get creative with using the last of the tomatoes.  If we have enough tomatoes, then there's ketchup to make!! This is actually about half of a large tomato haul of this weekend that I used to make catsup.  I took all our tomatoes (about 12-15 pounds), heated them up, and added a few ingredients:

Like many gardeners, I used to struggle with how to support my tomatoes. My cherry tomatoes, Roma/paste, and heirloom/eating tomatoes got so large and heavy that they quickly wound up dragging on the ground and entangled in a huge mess. I used store-bought tomato cages, but quickly found that these small wire tomato cages are useless. The large "sturdy" ones are a little bit better but they still eventually collapse under the weight of all the delicious fruit by mid summer. My solution to this common gardening dilemma? Homemade tomato cages, using concrete reinforcing mesh (the stuff they use to lay on the ground to pour concrete over). At my local hardware store I bought a roll of 5' x 50' 10 gauge concrete re-mesh, some baling wire, and a medium-sized pair of bolt cutters to snip it with. Construction actually went faster than I anticipated and I got two completed in about 45 minutes. Subsequent ones went much faster. To assemble the cages, ...