The Canning Chronicles

We very appropriately found this at the American History Smithsonian museum in DC last week:

Chris and I have been talking about gardening/canning since we got married. This summer we planted some fruit trees and a small garden. We aspire to be more like our amazing friends Raquel and Oliver. Check out their homestead: http://grittypretty.blogspot.com/2011/10/rotational-beds.html

Our garden in the front was quite productive, especially in the beet and tomato departments (are those actual departments?). We picked all of the remaining tomatoes the night before the big frost. We ended up with a few red tomatoes and about a million pounds of green ones. The fun part was that we decided to can all of them. So about $200 worth of equipment later (in addition to all the money we spent on the garden), and we had our own little cannery going.

Notice that Chris puts the giant canning over two burners at once!

Chad came to help. Yes, that is a football game he is watching in the background. Go Ducks!

OUR RESULT:

As for what to do with all those green tomatoes, I checked out some online recipes, and let's just say that we are like the Bubba Gump of green tomatoes. Green tomato relish, green tomato chutney, plain green tomatoes, pickled green tomatoes. You get the idea: You're really going to want to be on our Christmas list this year!

And after all that we still had a bunch of green tomatoes left over. Luckily they ripen surprisingly well on their own:

Before:

Two weeks later:

Next year we will probably just let everything turn red before we can it. It's nice to still be eating fresh garden tomatoes well into November.

We're not quite at the pioneer level but working on it. Chris even bought a 'sprouter' last week.