Got a Little Sauced this Weekend

We canned around 10 gallons of tomatoes this weekend; plenty of tomato sauce for winter!

A weekend of tomatoes and a lot of canning

We finally reached Peak Tomato this past week and had to do something will all of these fruit or lose them. So we set up the turkey fryer and got to work processing, cooking and canning what turned out to be a little more than 100 lbs of tomatoes.

A few of the beefsteaks for the sauce

A few of the tomato varieties in this year’s sauce extravaganza

A few of the Oxheart paste tomatoes – my new favorite

Working through the weekend, we wound up with 84 pints (10-1/2 gallons) or tomato sauce, 12 quarts (3 gallons) of whole tomato, 16 pints of pasta — tomato, onion, garlic, sweet pepper, oregano, thyme and basil, all from the garden – sauce (2 gallons), and 8 bottles of ketchup (1/2 gallon).

The tomato processing station, round 1 of 5

And the making of the first of five rounds of sauce:

Processing it all took a full three days, but we ended up with over 120 pints of fresh packed, 100% organic tomatoes.

Given that the cooler weather has the tomatoes starting on another round of flowering and fruiting, we’ll probably have about another 30 – 40 lbs in the next couple of weeks.

A weekend of tomatoes and a lot of canning

Should be plenty to carry us through until next spring!

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