A huge, weird weather system came through the whole area the other day. The nation wide severe storm and tornado warning system was going off for well over an hour. We had wild winds, heavy driving rains in heavy cloud cover that had the outside solar lights on in the daytime because it was so dark. When it was all over and done, there were branches down every where. We were lucky that we still had hydro, but a lot of areas even nearby had none for hours. Once again, the storm took out my clothes line. The clean up of the yard yielded 6 trailer loads of branches, limbs and other tree debris. The clumps of leaves, just got mowed into mulch. The worst thing though, was that other half of the tree that fell on my garden in early July, came down, taking a pine tree with it, and it landed - yup, on my garden! The wire tomato cage and the spiral support are visible, but crushed and one tomato showing on the right side.
It mainly fell on the large Mortgage Lifter tomatoes in the raised beds. One was just lightly hit, and mainly with smaller limbs separate from the main trunk, so it was fairly easy to clean up. I ended up picking some of the very low fruit that was still green, because one of them had bite marks in it. I felt it was better to save the rest of those tomatoes, than feed whatever was making them dinner. The other plant though was completely covered by the tree. Hubby trimmed enough away so that I could pick all the still green tomatoes from the plant and bring them inside to ripen.
I was amazed at how quickly the rescued green tomatoes ripened inside. Mostly ripened, as when I realized that I had to either can them or use them up today, because they were ripening and quite soft, I found a couple of them were not quite ripe inside yet. I peeled and chopped them up. Mortgage Lifter tomatoes are a heritage breed which results in huge tomatoes, with lots of flesh bits. They're great on sandwiches. I heated them to a boil in a large pot so I could water bath can the batch. If you heat the jars, and heat the tomatoes, you can put them into a canner filled with near boiling water without risking thermal shock. I also find that heating the tomatoes allow me to put more fruit into the jars.
I also used a fair number of the fancy Black Cherry Tomatoes, which are actually greenish brown and green inside. (This is the important information) They are a nice size cherry tomato, albeit ugly. There are lots still on the vines. There were too many to eat and I didn't want them to go bad. A few seconds in a hot water bath and the skins slipped off nicely. I mixed them into the chopped tomatoes and I thought nothing of it, until I pulled the 7 jars from the canner. Because the huge tomatoes were chopped, the tomatoes separated, with the meaty part floating over the clear tomato juice. It's apparently a pectin issue which is released or broken down when chopped too much. One jar had to wildly green liquid on the bottom and a very green flesh. I will admit to commenting on the weird effect of the little brown cherry tomatoes. Then hubby, who remember pulled down the jars for me, reminded me that one of the jars I used was a fancy green glass one. So I actually think they are all normal and I was just doing the canning by rote and didn't even pay attention to the colour of the jar. How did I really not notice that? However, I'm happy that all jars sealed nicely and tomorrow afternoon, I'll be able to remove the rings, clean them up and store them away for winter use. Thankfully I didn't use one of the purple glass jars. I wonder what sort of surprise I would have had with that one?
