Too Many Tomatoes!

     Wenatchee would great for growing tomatoes! We really couldn't do that on the wet side of the mountains. Oh, the cool weather veggies that Milly and Vake grew in their annual "Victory Garden" would thrive--peas, cabbages, and those despicable rutabagas, but it was too cool for tomatoes.
     Our subdivision lot is small, but I had room for two 8'x3' raised beds plus room for six plants next to the fence on our south side and four more in the flower bed that used to be a lawn. The flower bed and the raised beds are visible from our living room.  I went all out to give the plants good garden soil mixed with steer manure and compost, and I planned to feed them generously with Miracle-Gro special tomato food.
    I plugged six plants each into the raised beds.  My more knowledgeable neighbors must have laughed to see how grossly I over-planted.  But what did I know? I don't think I'd ever seen a tomato plant bigger than two-and-a-half feet tall, except for one vine in Sandy's greenhouse. The plants took off like crazy.  I staked them onto bamboo stakes to keep them off the ground, but they quickly over-topped the stakes.  In fact, they over-topped me!      
     By  August I had tomatoes ripening at a rate of  about 10 pounds every other day.Now, later in August, I think I'm getting twenty pounds per day.  We have cooked plain tomatoes and tomato sauce with Italian seasoning by the gallons. Today I got lazy and just chunked them up and froze a basketful--then went out into the yard and discovered another basketful ready to pick.
     One experiment failed badly. I decided to make "sun-dried" tomatoes with our dehydrator. I chose nice, meaty San Marzanos that the Italians use for drying.  I sliced them, salted them, filled up the dehydrator trays, and plugged it in outside on the BBQ table.   I was running it with just the fan, no heat, so it wasn't going to dump heat in the house on a hot day, but I put it outdoors anyway because the trays vibrate a bit and make an annoying rattle. I checked it a couple of times, then forgot about it.  When I remembered it, darkness had fallen.  I unplugged it, carried it in--and discovered fruit flies streaming out the top. I rushed it back outdoors and slammed the door on the bugs, but had to use Raid plus a vacuum cleaner on the windows to get them out of the house.  The next day I had to hose off the dehydrator trays and remove an incredible biomass of fruit flies.  Another cloud of bugs rose and followed me to the compost pile where I discarded my effort to make cheap sun-dried tomatoes.
     We really have too many tomatoes, but what can I do? It's ingrained in me that it's a sin to waste food.