Preserving the Fresh Taste of Summer Harvest

row of several varieties of tomatoes

I don't have an extremely large garden, but it doesn't take many plants to suddenly find yourself inundated with more produce than you can eat or give away. Part of the beauty of gardening is growing enough so that, with a little time and effort, you can still enjoy the harvest into the winter. I planted 7 different varieties of tomato this year, one plant of each type: Celebrity, Sweet 100, Amish Paste, Hawaiian, Black Prince, Juliet, and Oxtail. The Hawaiian must have been mis-labeled at the nursery because it should have produced a large golden beefsteak type tomato. My "Hawaiian" is producing very small (just over pea size) red tomatoes.

Juliet tomatoes

By far, the most prolific plant has been the Juliet, followed closely by the Sweet 100. The Juliet is a mini-roma type of tomato. The foliage is so luxuriant and dense, it's kind of like hunting for Easter eggs when you're tying to pick all the fruit on the interior of the plant. I forgot to take a picture of my big bowl of Juliets that I used for making tomato sauce.

juicing the tomatoes

I put the tomatoes through the juicer, which was very easy...no need to peel or slice. The little Juliets were just the right size to drop into the feed tube. Nothing is wasted since the skin, seeds, etc will go into the compost pile to enrich the soil.

strained tomato juice

The juicer leaves a few seeds, so a simple run through the strainer gives a nice clean, smooth sauce. The clear bowl on the left in the background contains two Celebrity tomatoes and one Amish Paste tomato. The clear bowl on the right contains mostly Sweet 100's and a few unripe Juliets on top that I accidentally knocked off of the plant when I was picking.

cooking down the sauce

I cooked the sauce down to about 1/3 of its original volume to give a nice semi-thick sauce. Then I poured the sauce into sterilized 4-ounce jars along with some lemon juice (1/2 T per jar) and processed in a covered boiling water bath for 35 minutes.

I used small jars on this run because I want to have small sizes to use on homemade pizzas. Plus, my husband and I are empty nesters now, and don't go through the large volumes of food as we did when the children were at home. Next run I'll probably can somewhat larger jars for use in spaghetti sauce, marinara sauce, etc.

zucchini and yellow squash patch

I am amazed at how dense the foliage is on my squash/zucchini patch this year.  I check for squash and zucchini almost every day because they are more tender and tasty when small. Plus, a zucchini can grow to baseball bat size before you know it!

fresh zucchini

shredded zucchini

The shredding blade for my food processor is broken, so I just hand shredded these zucchini. It was pretty easy to do since the zucchini are nice and tender.

shredded zucchini ready for the freezer

I packed 2 cups of shredded zucchini into each freezer bag for future use in zucchini bread, zucchini chocolate cake, meat loaf, soups, stews, etc. I labeled the bags with the date and contents, including the measurement.

All in all, it was a fun and productive day!

Remembering Grandma and Grandpa With Moss Roses

I, along with my siblings and numerous cousins, spent a lot of time at Grandma and Grandpa's house growing up. They had a big garden, filled with vegetables and flowers, fruit trees and grapevines. There were also laying hens in the earlier years. It was a wonderland for us young folk, trailing along with Grandpa up and down the rows of veggies and tending to the flowers with Grandma.

As a little girl, I adored Grandma's flowers, but most especially her moss roses. I'm not sure why these humble little flowers, of all the other flowers in Grandma's garden, made such an impression on me. Maybe because they were little like me at the time...maybe because they were a riot of color...maybe because they went to sleep at night and woke up the next morning as the sun coaxed their petals open.

As I write my first ever blog post on my first ever blog, I wanted to start with a remembrance of my beloved Grandma and Grandpa, from whom I presume I inherited my love of gardening. Today I planted the moss roses, pictured above, in the little spot between the AC unit and the sidewalk at the back of the house.