Tomatoes: Thoughts & Plans

I made and canned spaghetti sauce this weekend. About the same amount of work as doing salsa, but with fewer types of vegetables added in, the yield amounted to 3 quarts. It is work I enjoy, for the most part, because the end result is so rewarding: preserving the harvest so it doesn't go to waste, and having delicious home-canned food in the pantry. However, taking a whole day to can tomatoes for 3 quarts of tomato sauce seems like a lot of effort for not very much payback.

Here's what I've decided would make it better and more efficient:

1. Find a friend! This would go so much faster with 2 people doing it! Obviously, the cooking and hot-water bath times would remain the same, but the prep time would be cut way down. And perhaps we could even get a second batch going while the first was cooking, or something.
I think I need to move closer to mom, so we can be canning buddies. :) I just know she would be up for it.

2. Do more than one batch at a time, which leads to...

3. Grow more tomatoes of different varieties.
One thing I have found out about us this year is that we don't eat very many fresh tomatoes: 2-3 full-size per week, if we're in a salad or sandwich mode. However, we do eat tacos and/or spaghetti at least once a week it seems. So we would use home-canned salsa and spaghetti sauce if it was available.
Both times I made salsa, I ended up buying at least 5 pounds more tomatoes from the Farmer's Market in order to have enough to make up the recipe. I probably should have done the same for the spaghetti sauce. So the yield from our 4 Better Boy plants-somewhere between 40 and 50 tomatoes so far--is far too many to eat fresh, but still not quite enough to can.
Also, the roma or paste tomatoes are supposed to be better for canning, which makes sense, because they have meatier walls and fewer seeds, equalling less juice to boil down. However, they are smaller, so it would take more of them. Not sure if they are determinate or not.

Bottom line: Next time plant 4-8 roma, preferably with different harvesting times, to use primarily for canning. Plant 1-2 "Better Boy" or similar indeterminate variety for eating fresh and to supplement yields for canning. Perhaps 1-2 experimental types would also be fun--yellow, or green zebras--to add some variety.

Plans for cherry tomatoes:

I have not been as good about giving these away or finding recipes to use them in. The thought of skinning them all made adding them to salsa recipes a little daunting, but perhaps there would be an efficient way to do this--if so, that would be awesome.

Once again, we prefer the "Sun Sugar" yellow-orange variety to the classic red "Sweet 100." With just one plant of each variety, we have still had way more cherry tomatoes than we can eat fresh. The "Sun Sugar" hasn't yielded nearly as many as the "Sweet 100" this year, so for cherry tomatoes, I want to try planting 2 Sun Sugars next year (or similar variety) and not plant the red ones at all.

That adds up to a whole lot of tomatoes!
Square-foot garden translation:

I've already decided that it would be better to give the tomatoes the 9-squares each away from the trellis, and put a tall sturdy cage around them, rather than trying to contain them in one square each and train them up a trellis. The containment and training components just didn't happen.

However, with 4x4 beds, that means only 1 tomato plant per bed. This needs more thought, because that would still take most of the available space in just tomatoes, when the other space-hogs, like squash, would need their own room.

End-of-Season Bounty

Bush beans and cherry tomatoes
Pole beans

More tomatoes!!

The abundance of tomatoes is inspiring me to new canning endeavors.

Now I'm thinking I need to find a good spaghetti sauce recipe for home-canning. I picked 19 tomatoes yesterday, and I can see a handful more ripe already. I think 2 batches of salsa (20 pints) should sustain us for at least awhile. So, onward and upward!

More tomatoes...

Just when I was feeling so proud for processing all of our garden tomatoes... A few days after making salsa I went out to our garden and picked 15 more tomatoes! So I actually made salsa again, with a few more purchased from the farmer's market. Little did I know that if I had waited, I could have used all my own. This evening I picked at least 10 more. Now that I have 20 pints of salsa on my shelves, I'm just going to have to start giving away some of these others.
We are visiting teaching this week. Maybe I can bring some to each appointment.

Cutting Garden Inspiration

So I bought this gorgeous bouquet from the Farmer's Market this week, and I took pictures to try and figure out what all is in it so that SOMEDAY I can grow a cutting garden and make beautiful bouquets of my own. Is that enough of a run-on sentence?

Not sure about the tall spiky-thing.
Obviously some huge sunflowers and pink cosmos. I'm wondering if the orange and deep pink with white edges are maybe dahlias?
The feathery purple cone-shaped ones are sure pretty, too. And they are lasting longer than some of the others. I asked the seller what they were but he couldn't tell me.

The little purple balls are gomphrena--I grew them in a pot one year with petunias and they looked really good. They're a type of clover, I think.

I am not in the habit of cutting flowers to bring in the house, but I want to start doing it more. If I just had a vase full of flowers going at all times, it would be a cinch to pluck out the dying ones every so often and put in a new stem or two. Plus, this bouquet cost $10!! Way too much, especially since it's mostly dying off already, and it's only been 4 days since I got it. Another advantage of snipping a few from my own garden and trying my hand at arranging them.

Finally, some green beans!

About half of these green beans are from the bush beans planted in early August!

There's actually enough for 2 meals. Wow!

Plus more tomatoes.

Homemade Salsa

It was time to preserve all these tomatoes!

So I made and canned some salsa.

For the whole story, see the family blog.

It's delicious!

Corn Harvest

A total of about 7 ears.

I went out and picked them for our Sunday dinner a couple of weeks ago. When I told Mom that I had harvested the corn, she said, "On Sunday?!" Then I told her how much there was.

"Oh, okay." She and dad have something like 4 rows of corn, each 100-feet long, or something like that. Nothing like our 3 squares worth.