I Had to Get Out the 5 Gallon Pot to Make Sauce This Time

I made the hugest batch of pasta sauce I have ever made. 

The amount of tomatoes that I peeled and deseeded would not fit into my largest cooking pot.  That was even before I got halfway through all of the ripe tomatoes I had.  I poured it into the large pot that we use for beer making and kept on peeling and deseeding until all the ripe tomatoes were in there.  I also added my sauce starter recipe: garlic, onions, celery and carrots all diced and cooked in olive oil until they are very soft. I seasoned it with red peppers, black pepper, salt and loads of herbs.  After cooking it down by half so that the sauce is nice and thick, it filled seven quart jars with about a pint extra.  I put it into clean jars with good tight lids in the refrigerator until I can either borrow a pressure canner, or get some containers to freeze it all.  I might just have room in the freezer for all of it.  I would rather can it, but I read the food safety recommendations for pasta sauce and pressure canning is recommended.  I read that you can just water bath process canned tomatoes, so I will be making canned tomatoes out of the rest of the tomatoes, I think.  I just hope I can come up with enough jars.  The heirloom tomatoes are starting to make lots of fruit now, too.  The only bushes that are starting to lag a bit are the Roma tomato bushes on the porch. I fed them some fertilizer, but I think they are just suffering for being confined to a pot and being allowed to get too dry a few times. The really exciting news is that I picked five rather large eggplants two days ago, and already there are a couple more that are definitely large enough to pick.

Look at these beauties. I am going to cook them up tonight.  I need to get some Parmesan cheese or maybe lasagna fixings.  They go great in anything really, once you fry them up.  I fried a bunch of sliced eggplant up for pizza topping last time we had homemade pizza night at our house.  My aunt loved them.

Here is a blurry shot just so you can see relative size to my hand.

I ordered two crocheted cotton market bags from Amie at www.etsy.com/shop/amieq to put my produce from my garden in.  They got here so fast and are such great bags, I can't say enough.  They are very sturdily made and I have no fear about sticking them in the wash when they get dirty.  They hold up to the tens of pounds of tomatoes, cucumbers and onions that I have been transporting in them.  I will also use them when I go grocery shopping.  I love them. You can also see some tomatillos here that I picked this week.  I broiled them and processed them with some broiled Anaheim chilies and jalapenos.  They weren't bad.  I wish I had more of them.

Here you can see that someone climbed up into my garden, grabbed some tomatoes, ate them right there and then and threw the tops right down in the front of the garden so I could make sure and see that they were there.  Since I took this picture, I have not seen any evidence of trespass, or vandalism.  I wonder what this person was thinking.

Well, I should get back to work figuring out what to do with all of the sauce.  I will let you know how the tomato canning goes.  

I also made a trip over to the in laws garden.  Wow, it is looking really good.  The corn is getting close to being ready and they are still picking loads of green beans.  Actually they are getting even more green beans now because the pole beans are now coming on.  The pumpkins, squash and melons are doing great.  They have one pumpkin that is getting so big, it is threatening to shadow out everything else.  They have several watermelons that will definitely get ripe, not to mention cantaloupe.  I am allergic to cantaloupe, but they look really delicious.  Oh, I almost forgot to mention the piles of cucumbers that they are harvesting.  It is so cool to see. Next time I go I will have to take some pictures for you.

Pictures of the Community Garden

After my last post about the community garden, I had to take a little break and calm down.  I had to tell my self that the garden still looks pretty nice, and most things are still doing fine.  I didn't plant that sunflower, anyway.  It was a volunteer that made it past my weeding.  I plucked out lots of other volunteers but that one made it through.  I shouldn't be so upset.  Another gardener saw me looking at  the damage and said, "that's what you get for having the most beautiful garden."  I can either take that as a compliment and be happy, or get angry.  I am trying to be happy.

I will start with pictures of the harvest strewn on the backseat of my car.  I forgot to bring my paper bag and box with me.

Here are the tomatoes.  The green ones were on the ground, so I picked them up.  I might do something with them or wait until they ripen.  These are mostly Romas.  I think the thieves picked a bunch of the Early Girl and Superfantastic because there should be more of these.

This is over two quarts of cherry tomatoes.  I sent a bunch with Heath to work today.

There were a few purple beans, a garden salsa pepper and one jalapeno from the plant on the right hand side of the garden.

These are the other peppers.  There are two Anaheim chili peppers, two jalapenos from the other side, and two Thia hot peppers.  I can't wait to see how hot those are.

Blurry pictures are starting to bother me.  Maybe I should invest in a camera instead of trying to use my iPhone camera or borrow one from my aunt.

This tomatillo fell off of the plant.  I don't know how to tell when they are ripe, but I will try to roast this one up and see how it is.

I pulled out a few carrots that could be reached from the front to make it harder for people walking by to pick them.

These are from one of the volunteer tomatoes on the back fence.  They hid out in the peas until my aunt and I started to pull the peas out.  We decided to leave these and tie them to the fence.  This one is some kind of pink fleshed large variety and the other large volunteer tomato is a large red cherry tomato variety,  They are just starting to get ripe.

I took this picture from where the sunflower used to be.  You can see most of the garden.  the sun was getting low so the shadows are dark.

This is the cucumber patch.  They are trying to creep into the potatoes, but my aunt and I have used small stakes to hold the vines back and make them grow to the side.  It is working pretty well.  We still have to check on it and move the stakes periodically.

This is the Cheyenne pepper plant.  You can't see any peppers from here, but...

There are a few hiding back here.  I almost missed them.  I will pick them when they turn red.

These are the Garden salsa pepper and the right side jalapeno plant.

These are the Danver short carrots.

This is what is left of the right side onion rainbow shape.  The produce thieves/vandals have left these two alone so far.

This is what the potatoes look like.  I am sure there are a few small new potatoes down under the ground.  I hilled the dirt up over the stems two weeks ago.

This is the early girl tomato.  I had to cut it back quite a bit last week.  The top branches were getting very tall and trying to grow fruit way up there.  That could only lead to broken branches.

The same plant from the side.

The scarlet runner beans are just getting cooked in the sun on that fence. We are not getting nearly as many beans as we should be. At least they are protecting the garden from the cooking heat off of the sidewalk and asphalt road.

This is a picture looking down the fence at the volunteer tomatoes and tomatillo.

The cherry tomato plant is incredible.  It has produced gallons of tomatoes.  They are so sweet and delicious.

The bush beans are still looking pretty poor.  I saw the beans at my mother-in-law's house last week.  Hers are looking so good.  She has been picking beans everyday for a while.

This is one of the pumpkin plant hills.  I doubt we will get any pumpkins.  They are just too far behind.  The heat is helping, but probably not enough.  I hope I am wrong.

This is the other pumpkin hill.

Just another view of the cucumber patch.

The little Bradley heirloom tomato plant still looks pretty much the same.

The Anaheim chili looks pretty bad still, but the other peppers are really going to town in the heat.

These are the Thia hot pepper and the other jalapeno.

This is the volunteer tomato plant that I picked the two tomatoes from.  The one in the back is the cherry tomato.

This is the roma bush.  It is really starting to produce strongly now.  I have to make another batch of sauce.

From here you can see the ripening tomatoes.

Well, that is about all there is to say about the community garden plot.  I made two jars of pickles when I got home form this garden trip.  I hope to make several more.  Some of the cucumber plants were planted much later than the first and haven't even started making fruits yet.  Have a wonderful rest of the week.

Patio Plants are Going Strong: The latest pictures are in

I have to say, I have the greenest balcony I have ever seen.  I won't lie and say it is very tidy, but it definitely is very green.  The most exciting two pieces of news are:  the eggplant is finally making fruit and the pole beans I plated to grow over the balcony rails and up the side of the porch are making beans.

This is the biggest eggplant.

This one is still quite small.  I counted five of them that are definitely fruiting, and loads more flowers, as well.

You can't see the beans here, but the iPhone does not take close up pictures very well and the bean pictures just would not turn out.  When I pick a few I will take a picture of that.  Don't you think the beans look nice growing like this? 

Oh, I forgot.  There is one more piece of exciting news.  We got our first tomato off of the Belgian beauty heirloom tomato plant.  It is small, but cute.  I will let you know how it tastes.

This is the little guy before I picked him.  He is so cute.

The rest of his brothers (don't ask me why tomatoes are boys today) are much bigger and very lumpy.  They are not showing any color yet.

These two are hanging on the outside of the balcony railing.

There are s few hidden inside the foliage.  The pole beans have used some of the branches to climb up.  I am not too worried about that.

Here are a couple more future Belgian beauties.

This is what the eggplant looks like now.  If you look close you can see the leaves that were damaged by the aphid infestation.   Many of them have fallen off, and lots of new clean wonderful leaves have grown in.  It is really flowering strong.  Eggplants make such beautiful flowers.

This is the super hot jalapeno plant.  We have picked about 5 or 6 of these, and they are quite hot.  I was wondering if growing in a pot would make them wimpy, but it does not seem to have affected them.  They even made my husband cry and he loves hot peppers strait from the garden.  There he was crunching away on a whole pepper, with tears streaming down his cheeks saying, "wow, honey, these are great peppers."  I am not that into hot peppers.  I don't eat them strait and raw like that.  I like to make salsa and use them in my cooking.

This is the baby roma that I rescued.  It is just as big as its two larger twin brothers, but is a little behind.  It has has only one ripe tomato while its brothers have each had around 10.

I have always liked hens and chicks.  These are very cute.  If you don't remember, I found these in my mothers garden when she moved into a new house and we were clearing it to make room for vegetables.  They were very small and cute.  I thought they might be a smal variety, but they have grown quite large to prove me wrong.  I will definitely take these with me and plant them in the ground when we get a house.

Here are the lavender plants my daughter rescued in the same weekend.  I think they have grown as big as their pots will let them. We have picked and dried some flowers for my daughters magic potions, or should we call them chemical solutions.  She loves to mix things up and see what happens.

The cherry tomato has also run out of room in its pot, I believe.  It has really stopped growing.  It is still making tomatoes ( I took this picture after I picked the ripe ones), but I think it might not do very well in the future.  You can see the roots crowding in the pot.  Notes for next year: do not plat cherry tomatoes or romas in pots. Peppers, beans, and eggplants seem to do great though.  I think next time I will listen to the experts and plant determinant varieties of tomatoes.  There are several nice heirloom tomatoes that are determinate.  I bought one late this spring, the Bradley that I squeezed into the garden plot between the peppers and tomatoes.

This is one of the Roma twins.

The Rosemary is doing quite well.  I believe I will cut it back and dry the clippings for an herbal soap.  I do love rosemary soap.

This is the other Roma twin.

This picture is very blurry, but you can get the idea.  The cinnamon basil is huge and the flowers have gotten away from me.  I was trying to keep them clipped off, but there are just too many now.  The beans are loving them.  That is good.  That might be why everything else is fruiting so nice when it wasn't before.

This is a picture of the Belgian beauty from farther away.

Remember when I freaked out because I thought that my basil would go to seed and I wouldn't have any to go with my tomatoes when they were ripe?  I went and planted several small pots with cinnamon and Thai basil.  Well, those are now starting to bloom as well.

This is the prettiest one. The pots are kind of small. I was thinking I would transplant at least some of them into the big pot, but the other basil is so huge that is not possible,

I caught Cooper at it again.  I really should change his name to Ferdinand the Cow.

You can even see his teeth chomping on that leaf.  He is incredible.  Well, I hope you liked the virtual tour of the balcony garden.  Next up:  a tour through the community garden plot after the vandals have gone.