Canning Tomatoes

 As you can see, our garlic did amazingly well this year! 

I have always thought of harvest in general, and tomato harvest specifically, and a race to get it all preserved.  We would get a ton of ripe tomatoes and dedicate an entire day or a whole weekend to processing everything.  Maybe that is because it is always a race against the clock here in the North to get enough ripe tomatoes at once to make that all happen.

This year they began ripening right on time, between the warm weather, and our pick of a couple of determinant types we are having volumes ripen, but staggered slightly to more an every other day time frame.  It has been a refreshing change to be canning a batch each night for a couple of hours, instead of the marathon to get them all done at once.  Trust me it is much more relaxed!  I have found that two cookie sheets of quartered Roma tomatoes will produce four quarts.  So far we have eight quarts done and another four that we made into sauce right away for consumption.  To give you a comparison, in the entire of last season (albeit a cool one) we had a total of six quarts of ripe roasted tomatoes; then of course 150 pounds that we processed into green tomato relish and sauce.  I must say that I am enthusiastic to be able to stock up and at this much more relaxed pace, it is the perfect way to settle into Fall!