More tomatoes

Did more tomatoes like last night. It worked so well!  We got 7 pints juice and 7 pints pulp tonight.  14 pints in pressure canner right now.

Took this picture just now (next morning):

What to plant in September

Here is a list of  veggies you can plant this month:

• Beet
• Broccoli
• Cabbage
• Carrot
• Cauliflower
• Cilantro
• Collard
• Dill
• Endive
• Kale
• Lettuce
• Radish
• Spinach
• Swiss Chard
• Turnip

Spinach is one variety that can be planted all over the country … so channel that inner-Popeye of yours, get over your excuses for not starting, and get that spinach planted!

Bean Loaf -- no bread

6 oz canned kidney beans
1 cup cooked brown rice
1 cup cooked chopped veggies (carrots, celery. onion)
garlic
3 Tbs country-style Dijon mustard
2 Tbs molasses

Drain and mash beans.  Add remaining ingredients.  Bake at 350 for 45-60 minutes.

New approach to tomatoes!

Katherine found a reference to a technique to process tomatoes that is such a neat idea!  The technique first processes the tomatoes with the hot water bath juicer to separate the water juice from the tomato solids, then the solids can be run through the Foley mill and used for a thicker tomato sauce!  Brilliant!

Pressure canning tomatoes on hotplate

Katherine is doing crushed tomatoes up here on the farm using the new hotplate that we got a month ago.  The hotplate was a bit disappointing for hot-water bath because it takes so long to heat a full canner load of loaded jars!  We are proceeding with the general recipe found at NCHFP, but it agrees with the ball blue book recipe as well.  We did not add any acid to this first batch because we had mostly heirloom tomatoes which are known to be high acid.  If we do Roma tomatoes, perhaps we should add some citric acid.

However, for pressure canning, it is perfect!  We are at an altitude of 1150 ft here and the books say we should be doing quarts of tomatoes about 15 mins at 15 lbs pressure.  With the 15lb weight on, the hotplate heats up the canner to pressure in about 15-20 mins (of course, the time will depend on how hot the jars were when you put them in as well as how hot the water in the canner was before you put the jars in).  Then we vented for 7 mins, placed the weight on and started the 15 min countdown.  We adjusted the heat control from 12 (max) to 8 to maintain the 15 psi.  The hotplate had no trouble maintaining the pressure.

Katherine prepared and canned 7 quart jars and 6 1.5 pint jars of tomatoes today!  They all sealed with no mishaps or problems.

A total of 11.5 quarts today!

Beets

Canned 7 quarts of beets up on the farm.

Most of the beets came from mom, but some - maybe 1/4 (at most)  came from our gardens here and the raised beds in SS.   Some were turning woody, so I think its time to harvest all of the beets (I assume that the woodiness comes from cold weather - although some of the woody ones were white beets which only come from the SS beds...).

I drove up to farm; arrived around 2:30-3ish

First thing I did was tighten up the hydraulic lines on the tractor.  We will see if that works tomorrow.

Then I picked and sorted tomatoes from all three patches - amounted to about 10 gallons - most have to ripen before they can be processed though.

Pressure Canned green beans!

Kath and I pressure canned 12 quarts (yes, quarts!) Of green beans! Was up until past 2 am !

This was the first use of our pressure canner!  Very simple.to.use.  I was impressed over how little water it needs and how much less burner power is needed!

We are planning to can some tomatoes with it this weekend!