Vine to Jar

In spite of the record setting low temperatures here in Iowa for July we were able to can our first batch of tomatoes today. I had previously picked a few ripe ones to eat (on burgers; yum), but today we were able to pick enough ripe ones to make it worth while to can them. We planted a dozen tomato plants and there are a lot of nice sized green tomatoes on all of them just waiting to ripen. I'm not sure when we will get more ripe ones to can, but we are expecting some warm weather in the next few days which I hope will ripen them up so I can do another batch next Saturday. There are a few tomatoes that are turning, so the sun over the next week ought to bring on the red. Even though it was a only a few dozen tomatoes we were able to can 3 quarts and 1 pint. We always grow green bell peppers with tomatoes and then dice them up and add them and some onions with the tomatoes when we can. My body doesn't tolerate the seeds so I always core out the tomatoes and remove the seeds so we lose some of the tomato, but the meaty part of the tomato cooks up nice and is what we like. We use the tomatoes we can during the winter to make chili and meatloaf. We are hoping to can a lot of tomatoes this season as we didn't have a garden last year and are running low on what we canned in 2007.

I know I can go out and buy canned tomatoes and not have to go to all of the work to do it myself, but the taste of fresh home grown tomatoes (the ones that never reach the jars) is worth it.