Growing Tomatoes & Canning Tomatoes - advice from First Timers

 This is our final harvest of our very first season ever growing tomatoes. We are super excited to try some recipes and can some sauces and salsas in the coming weeks. Here is what we learned from our first time.


1. We should have planted them farther apart. When they are little, six inches seems like a lot of room, but they just grow and grow and tangle all up in each other. It's a big mess. Next year, we will give them plenty of room.

2. We should have spent the money on the tomato cages. This would have helped with the tangling. We did try attaching them to straight metal rods that we already had thinking that it was better to use something we had on hand rather than buying something new for just this one purpose. But, if we had used the cages, we would have had a better harvest throughout the season and not had so many green ones buried in the mess.


3. It's good to pick them green. They will ripen on the counter over several days. Those ones in the middle were picked green five days ago and they are just about perfect now. All these green ones will ripen over the next week. If you wait until they are fully ripe on the vine to pick them, then you risk them getting overripe and falling onto the ground where they split and go bad.

4. Canning tomatoes is pretty easy. I already have all my canning supplies in the dining room because we have been doing apples lately, so that took care of the hardest part of canning tomatoes. 

First, boil a pot of water. Then, dip the ripe tomatoes into the boiling water until the skin splits (about 30 seconds)

Second, take them out of the boiling water and put them in cold water right away to stop them from cooking.

Then, in a few minutes, when they are cool enough to handle, the skins will slip right off. You can core the centers to get out the seed and hard stem part.

Lastly, dice them and pack them tightly into jars and then add boiling water to the jar to fill in any air space. Process in water bath for 45 minutes. You can also run them through the food mill to make tomato sauce, which you can then can by itself or turn into spaghetti sauce to can.

***Obviously, follow any and all safety and sanitation protocols as recommended in all the good canning books for food safety. My favorite canning guide is my antique version of the Ball Book.

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