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It’s been years since Rick and I canned tomatoes. Back in Two Rock, we planted enough tomatoes to feed a village. In our best year, we harvested over seven hundred pounds of tomatoes…spread the wealth on the farm, donated some, and canned over eighty quarts of tomato products, whole plum tomatoes, diced tomatoes and tomato sauce.

Since then, we’ve been too busy–and we’ve had garden failures. This year, we finally had decent tomatoes–full, tall, leafy, abundant and delicious. Our first harvest we froze. We blanched and skinned them, and then chopped them and bagged them into the freezer (I even skinned cherry tomatoes, because we had so many. You have to be a little crazy to skin cherry tomatoes.) We got over a gallon of frozen diced tomatoes. While nothing compared to Two Rock, it’s a pleasure to be back in business again. You cannot beat the flavor of home grown tomatoes.

I’ve had friends question the wisdom of growing and canning tomatoes. After all, canned tomatoes, even organic, are not that expensive. But the flavor of home grown makes it all worthwhile. This is food. The stuff from the stores is mere fuel.

So yesterday was the second harvest. We’d had winds and rain, they were splitting and dropping. The culls will go to the chickens (who knew chickens liked tomatoes?) So I set up to make sauce.

In storage, we have a fancy manual tomato processer–you can turn out gallons of tomatoes into sauce in short order. But storage is something we’ll get to when “season” slows. And I only had about eight or nine quarts of tomatoes, so I did them all by hand. It looked like a lot. Rick went down to the basement and retrieved seven pint jars and lids.

How soon you forget. Sauce cooks down. A lot. For our trouble we got four pints of tomato sauce. We’ve already eaten one….it smelled so good cooking, I couldn’t resist. But the taste is incredible! It reminds us why we did so much of it before. We’re blending tomatoes–Amish canning tomatoes, San Marzanoes and Black Cherokees. Combined, they have a meaty heft–but are still sweet and aromatic.

I put half of those empty jars back in the basement. We’ll do it again–there will be more ripe in next week or so, but we have a long way to go before we’re actually productive. This year was a garden trial run.

Autumn is looming. No significant color in the forest yet…but those errant branches are far more intense. They’re trying to get our attention. Winter is coming.

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