Wednesday, July 22, 2015

My tomatoes are dying... :(

Here in the Midwest (USA) we have had an unusually wet summer.  It has rained so much that my tomato vines, in addition to having a raging case of blight, are dying simply because the soil is so wet.  The tomatoes are rotting from the inside-out before they are ripe.  So, this morning I decided to do something different.  I went ahead and picked all of the tomatoes that are kind of red, but not ripe yet.  I cut them up into pieces and filled a 2 gallon soup pot, put on a lid and simmered them until they were tender, stirring often.

Here are the tomatoes cooking:


 When they were all tender, I strained them with my Foley Food Mill (worth it's weight in gold!)  I bought mine many years ago and it is tinned steel, but now they make them out of stainless!


 Here is all that was left from all of those tomatoes.  This is the skin, seeds and cores:



You can see that the color of the juice is rather insipid:


SO!!!  I added 2 cans of tomato paste!


See how much better it looks?  (The taste is much better also.)


I added 2 Tablespoons of RealLemon lemon juice to each quart jar and 1 teaspoon of sea salt:


Then I processed the jars for 40 minutes in my steam canner.  A water-bath would work the same.


Here are the 6 jars.  It really is delicious, by the way.


I wanted to show you this in case your tomatoes are dying too.

4 comments:

  1. That's so sad that your plants of dying! :( I hope the rain will stop soon. Send it our way!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I really wish I could. I've haven't seen a year like this in probably 25 years!

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  2. I am glad you salvaged what you could. Though is that your whole harvest of tomatoes for the year? :( So sad if it is!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, I actually canned 13 more quarts of juice on Monday. That will help. :)

      Delete

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