Tomato Time Around Here

It's finally tomato time around here! I planted 38 tomato plants this year and I am so excited to start making stuff with them. Last night was my first official harvest and I weighed 17 pounds on the scale. Not to shabby for the first picking.

 

More than half of my plants are Roma-style tomatoes and the others are a combination of Celebrity and Better Boys. Since it was hot and I was tired I decided that I would make simple crushed tomatoes and can them. Now that I am set up again, the next batch will be salsa or juice or sauce or something interesting. But for this one time it was easy.

 

I did not season the crushed tomatoes nor did I salt them. I am sharing my harvests with my mom and they don't like salt. I tend to add it to most things I cook in the form of spices anyway so I left it out. The recipe called it optional and I took them seriously. I canned pints using the boil bath method and added 1 TBSP of lemon juice to each pint jar before I added the crushed tomatoes. This assures the proper acidity for this method of canning. Last year I used up all the jars I had canned and this year I ought to have tons of tomato products lining my shelves. And yes, I am still thinking hard about making my guest room into a pantry. No one uses it much anyhow. The guest can just sleep in an awesome pantry. That would be a novel story to tell all their friends when they leave my house.

It Won't Win the County Fair

As the title of this post implies, my newly canned pickled asparagus will not be winning any County Fair prizes. Which is fine as the County Fair is two months away. I have plenty of time to pickle some prettier stuff. There is tons of this stuff grown semi-locally that can be picked up on the day it is cut. This particular harvest was "Starting At $.75/ lb". I should have known there was a reason it was so cheap and not just because they cut out the middle man. When I arrived at the packing plant, this was the stuff they couldn't sell to the stores. Still nice looking but not completely uniform. I had planned to can 75 lbs and a friend was to help us and split the bounty. After I saw the "sale" stuff, I settled on 30 lbs. and will do more later. My husband can't stand the idea of tossing out so much good stuff and used the tender stems too. I don't eat a ton of pickled asparagus but he does. If he is willing to eat the stems too, then stems it is. I have to agree, there is an amazing amount of waste if you only go for the pretty tops. We added lots of sliced jalepeno and fresh garlic cloves to the bottom of each jar before we filled them with asparagus spears (and stems). I obviously wasn't the one filling the jars with brine or the one on the right would be full to the proper level. I think my husband was on that duty. It took 3 of us about 2.5 hours to can 18 quarts of this stuff. I sure hope it tastes good.

CHICKEN HOUSE UPDATE

Our chicken house is coming along. Not as quickly as I would like but then nothing ever does. We put up the siding last weekend and still need to trim it out and build the attached enclosed and roofed run. That will be the length of this side you see now. The roof for it will begin below the window at the top. This side faces the south and should get some extra sunlight in the morning. Chickens need 14 hours of sunlight per day to lay in the winter. I will need to augment this as our days are short in the winter. The third pop door on the left will not be used initially as it opens to the ante room where I will store the food and supplies. I just wanted to plan for the possibility of a brooder if we ever hatch out our own chicks. Pre-planning for things makes implementing them easier later. We will add batons and trim, then paint it. I haven't fully figured out the color yet but something will come to me. I would like it to blend in so maybe the same color as the house. We will see, I just figured the lighter the color... the cooler it will stay in the summer. My brother will be wiring it for electricity this next weekend. I love my brother he always does this kind of nice stuff for us.

First Time Canner

This past summer was the first time I have ever canned. Yep, every year we eat as much as we can fresh and give away as much as possible. No one locks their cars around here until summer harvest begins. Then you can't find an open car to "donate" veggies to if you try. Something about un-found veggies in the Idaho heat, I don't know. Anyway, I have a friend who is the master home preserver for our county and she steered me in the right direction as far as up-to-date info goes. She recommended the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving and the Ball Blue Book of Home Preserving. But because I am simply neurotic about not killing my family, I also purchased Canning and Preserving for Dummies. When you are trying to learn something as important as proper food handling and preserving, you don't want to screw up. I had a disastrous encounter with canning tomatoes many years ago and I must say after much reading, I now know what they really mean by "core" a tomato. I read everything in my local library and all three of the books I already mentioned. By the time it was time to can I felt pretty good about it. One bit of advice I will pass on is that Great, Great Aunt Millies old Fashioned Green Bean recipe may be out of date by today's standards and maybe should be reevaluated for safety. Food is simply different now days and some things aren't as naturally acidic as they once were. Modern recipes are the safer way to go. I am really looking forward to this years harvest. I will expand my canning adventure to encompass pressure canning too. This way I can can more vegetables and salsas and... you get the picture.

The above picture is of some of the things I canned this year. I used a steamer/juicer to juice elderberries, wild plums and blackberries. I then canned the juice so I could make jelly with them later. I made bread-n-butter pickles, dill pickles, applesauce, salsa verde, stewed tomatoes and a few other misc. things. I am really excited to see what I can put up this year. It tends to redirect your garden plans. Why plant 6 tomato plants when you can have 30? See what a problem this may create?