Family Canning Event

Yesterday we picked 95 pounds of tomatoes.  

Yes.  95.  Ninety-Five.  NINETY... FIVE.

It was a busy day so when we got home in the afternoon I took a nap and just didn't have the energy to start working on them.  So this morning I woke up and started getting things organized.

Luckily, the boys were more than willing to step up and help.  I decided not to question their motives and we had an assembly line across the kitchen counter. 

I dropped the tomatoes in the pot to boil for a minute and then dumped them into the cold water in the sink.  The youngest would pick them up and peel them, then I would cut the cores out, and then the oldest would scoop out the seeds.

We got about 40 pounds of tomatoes done this way.

Add caption

 I was able to start the pot for spaghetti sauce.



Then I realized we had a lot of seeds, juice, peels, and core pieces that were going out to the chickens.  Too many.  So I did some research and saw that I could dehydrate the seeds and peels and use them in recipes later so I started doing that.




I was also reminded that I could dehydrate tomatoes to make sun-dried tomatoes so I decided to use a bunch of the small ones for that purpose and I sent the oldest out to the garden to grab the few small tomatoes that I'd seen growing.

The youngest got one tray organized in an artsy pattern while the oldest disappeared outside.

 And then the oldest walked back in.  I guess we didn't just have a couple tomatoes in the garden.

We ended up with three trays of tomatoes to dry, some were peeled and some weren't.

We ran out of space in the dehydrator and I didn't want to waste anything so I poured the tomato juice and seeds into jars and put them in the refrigerator.

We also have two containers of tomato peels waiting to be dried.  And even with the plan to find ways to use those parts of the tomatoes, we still had 8 cups of core pieces that we blended up and took out to the chickens.

And that is only from about half of the tomatoes.  I estimated that we used about 40 pounds of tomatoes, which leaves 55 pounds to still work on this week.

What's left for this week

 The tomatoes look almost done in the dehydrator and the spaghetti sauce looks and smells great since I ran out to the store to buy the other ingredients to add to it and it's been cooking all day.

Once I had the spaghetti sauce completely ready to cook all day, we took off to spend a few hours at the pools.

I'm excited to get this canned this week and to finish with the rest of the tomatoes, but the task does seem a little daunting as well.


This post was shared on The Homesteaders Blog Hop