The Word-Nerd’s Homestead – Summer 2021: Blog Edition #3-1

Garden to Jar

Last time I talked about harvesting & canning stuff, I had made salsa & spaghetti sauce. Before that (pre-blog), I had put up quite a bit (30 pints) of homemade soup from all my tomatoes so far.

This time around, I couldn’t decide what to do with all the tomatoes, so first I froze a batch (about 2 gallons), and then the rains came.

After a day or two, the ones on the shelf ripened and then started to rot on me, and the ones in the garden began to split, so I had to do something with them or they would be wasted. So, I just put up more plain tomatoes. It’s not exactly what I wanted because I already had a lot left from last year. Oh well, waste not want not.

So, I gathered, cleaned and cooked up what I had fresh and then added in the frozen 2 gallons to make one big batch. I cooked the devil out of them and put them in quart jars, 7 total, with 2 quart bags back in the freezer (I didn’t want to run another pressure canner batch for just 2 quarts). That will all probably be used for homemade soup eventually.

This is probably the last of the tomatoes unless they start doing something crazy. I planted very close together (lots of plants) this year, so I removed all the sucker shoots from them all. This means that even though they are not super crowded and bushy, they are also not making nearly as many tomatoes as I’m used to per plant. I don’t think I’ll do that next year, even if it means I have a tomato jungle.

What has surprised me about the garden is the amount of purple hull peas I’ve gotten off the four 50′ rows I have. They are still producing like crazy. Much more that I thought they would. They took of an started climbing, which I didn’t know they did. I’m definitely planting more of these, and I may expand the trellis I made for the English peas just to work for these.

One thing I do need, though, is one of those Taylor pea shellers. It takes 2 to 3 hours to shell about 1 peck of these things by hand. The sheller would do it in about 5 minutes. Unfortunately, they are super expensive. Like around $600 expensive! I think I’ll shell by hand, thank you very much!

I blanched this last batch (made about a gallon) and froze it until I get enough to justify a canning. As of the writing of this blog (8/24), there are more ready to be picked, but it’s hot & I’m lazy.

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