I always forget by the time it’s next harvest season (or even next growing season), so I’m writing a post, simply for my memory, but feel free to follow along!
This year, I planted sooo many seeds and most of them died. the only thing that survived were my tomato plants (and I planted a ton of them, thinking I’d sell them or give some to family or neighbors. But by the time I got them in the ground, I didn’t wanna give them to everyone else because they were not in great shape. They needed to be planted sooo much sooner, not halfway into June! But I have toddler twins, and a super active preschooler (still technically a toddler when I was growing from seeds and planting), and needed help to get them in the ground. I intended to keep track of how many plants were out in the garden, but… I didn’t.
When we harvested all the tomatoes before the freeze, 99% were still green. But when hey did finally ripen, they were pretty yellows and purples and some nice round reds. I got about 10 green tomatoes and 1 (count it) white tomato. I think I had more white, but they ended up in the green salsa/enchilada sauce because they didn’t look like they would ripen well (which is how I decided which green tomatoes to select).
From those 10ish boxes of tomatoes, I’ve gotten
- 17 pts freezer green salsa (somehow I messed up and it made a ton so I didn’t feel safe canning it)
- 31 pts regular salsa (a batch of 8 used the only peppers I got from plants I bought on clearance and the onions my MIL gave me. The jalapenos were smaller than my fingernails, but I had a few good poblanos and some mini bells, some Cajun bells [spicier?], some seranoes, and some spicy banana peppers) 23 jars used serranoes, Jalapenos, and green bells.
- 7 pts green salsa (I labeled it small batch green salsa to keep track of 2 different recipes I’m trying this year )
- 7 qts stewed tomatoes
- 6 qts spicy stewed tomatoes
- 1 batch of bbq sauce (I’ll have to update the total, but I think I got about 14 half-pints of sauce)
- 18.5 qts green enchilada sauce
- 9 qts of stewed tomatoes (forgot the salt, dang it!)
- 4.5 qts of leftovers from previous batches (mixed stewed and rotel/spicy stewed)
- 16 pts of salsa (jalapenos and green peppers only)
- 12 qts of whole tomatoes
- 12 qts of tomato juice (one jar was a hand-me-down from my grandma and isn’t quite a quart, but there’s another hand-me-down jar that is probably over a quart, so I’m just rolling with it)
- 11 qts whole tomatoes (forgot the salt in 4 of them again! And I had the *worst* luck. In one batch I only had 1 jar seal!)
- 32 pts of green salsa with very little heat. I ended up doing the math wrong and making way more than intended, but it used up all the greens I had left, so I wasn’t complaining!
- 14 jars (assuming they all seal, as they’re cooling as I type) of herb tomatoes. And I am DONE with tomatoes. whew.
I also bought 3 boxes of tomatoes (in case mine never got ripe), 1 box of peaches (all they had was white when I went to buy them. I looked at a comparison chart and I’m guessing they’re Georgia Belles?) and 1 box of pears around mid-September. In which, I got:
- canned sliced peaches (when I actually count this, I need to remember I’ve already snitched one jar)
- canned quartered pears
- multiple varieties of mixed fruit (note, some of the mixed fruit came from my friend delivering fruit from her tree and my MIL giving me a box of peaches. Most of my MIL’s peaches went into jam this year, though because the peaches didn’t know if they were gonna be too firm or too mushy and were varying combinations within the same peach)
- 34 qts of whole tomatoes
So… how much does approximately 10 boxes of tomatoes weigh? I measured it all because I was curious.
I used:
- 7 1/2 lbs green
- 4 1/2 lbs green
- 30 lbs green
- 17.5 lbs green
- 5 lbs ripe
- 1 1/4 lbs ripe
- 5 lbs ripe
- 10 lbs ripe
- 14 lbs ripe
- 11 lbs ripe
- 5 lbs ripe
- 12 lbs ripe
- 5 lbs ripe
- 10 lbs ripe
- 12 lbs ripe
- 22 lbs ripe
- 22 lbs ripe
- 3 lbs ripe
- 25 lbs ripe
So, just under 60 lbs of green and 128 (and change) pounds of ripe tomatoes!
I also turned our tomato skins into tomato sauce (because a), paste scares me, and b), I think sauce has more uses). The first batch (which included leftovers from last year that I never processed – just left in the freezer – started out as 20 qts of skins and turned into 3 3/4 qts (in 20 different half and quarter pint jars). The second batch is still sitting in the fridge waiting for processing, (it’s not nearly as much, but with all the heirloom tomatoes, the bowl is quite colorful).
Also of note: I bought 200 regular Tattler lids and 100 wide mouth Tattler lids. At the end of canning season, I have 0 regular and 35 wide-mouth lids left. I would have had less but I don’t like doing tomatoes with tattler lids, so I finished off the tail end with the normal kind I had in storage. Seriously, I bawled my eyes out one night. I have never had so many problems canning. I have had great success with the tattlers in water-bath canning, but canning in the pressure canner… yeah. lets just say that the night I bawled, I got 1 successful jar in 2 canner loads (noted above). And a huge exploded mess inside the canners. I don’t think I need all 100 tattler lids in the future, to be honest. But I definitely could use more regular mouth lids!
