Harvest slowing down

The harvest is slowing down. The only tomatoes left in the garden are the volunteer plants. We haven’t picked all of them, and they were much later than the ones we planted. The peppers are still doing well and I will have to make sure they are well covered for the next frost. I hear we are supposed to have something on Friday night. I didn’t take time to do a thorough picking, but this is what I brought inside today. I spent the majority, heck the entire day, doing up the second to last of the tomatoes. Tomorrow I plan to finish off what I am doing and the rest can go on the compost heap because they are rotting before they are fully ripe. I suppose they have a disease or something. I think a year off will do the soil good.

Harvest of the day.

Below is what I accomplished today. I didn’t have the energy to dig out the entire process with the blender and the strainer cone, though that did come out for a bit. I went downstairs and took another count just to be sure. From it I decided it would be good to make whole tomatoes. I filled the sinks with the beefsteak tomatoes that were ready. In finding them I ended up with an ice cream pain (5 qt.) of rotten tomatoes. You figure it out. On Monday I used up every last ripe tomato that was on there. Tuesday I was gone, Wednesday I was gone and today they are bad. So today I did 18 quarts. I started with the idea of doing whole tomatoes. Instead of peeling them straight into the jars, which I usually do, I put them all into a kettle then pulled off some of the liquid. I ran that through the cone (without the blender first) and ended up with 4 qts of juice and 10 qts. of whole tomatoes. Next I did up as many Roma tomatoes as were ripe. From those I made 4 qts of spaghetti sauce. Below is one of each: whole, juice, spaghetti with garden basil.

Production of the day

I have a good sized box of Roma’s left and a few beefsteak on the table. By the time Paulina gets home from Jamestown, I should have the final batch run through. Good thing too as the jars are starting to get low and there is no room on the shelves. Already tonight the whole tomatoes and the spaghetti sauce ended up on one of the jar boxes for storage. Of course, I could save the canning for Saturday when Paulina is here to help. I should go into the garden tomorrow and pick what is anywhere near ready. I sure hate to see anything frozen when it could have been taken inside. It was really a pleasure today when my sister-in-law stopped to be able to give her a bag of freshly dried chili peppers. She mixes up some of her own spices and loves the hot chilies.

Last thing, not sure where I mentioned the squirrel, but I have figured out the face planting on the sunflowers. It, too, is the squirrel. Today without a major wind, one of the plants when down, obviously because the lard tail crawled up it. Either these cats get to work or I will get a new one that will. When Tigee was in her prime there was not a squirrel dared step in my mother’s yard. Come to think of it, no stray cat was allowed inside the borders either. She was better than one of those electric buried fences with a shock collar. Well that is all for now, Happy Gardening and Canning.