Tomahto, Tomayto, Tomato

Over the past few years, our garden tomatoes haven't done well.   We've had droughts, blight, more blight and one year the birds and bugs got to virtually every tomato before I did.   I almost didn't plant tomatoes this year and hubby had said why bother since we rarely get to harvest any.  However, I planted 4 plants.   There was hardly any choice of varieties at the garden centres and at one place, they already looked like they were stressed and diseased. 

 Our local feed store always carries a few starter plants, with very limited varieties since they are a small store.  I was told they purchase from a local grower.  I picked up a pot of 4 paste tomato plants.  They were 90 days until harvesting, so late at ripening.   Then we had the drought and a huge issue with blossom end rot.   I dedicated my watering to the now 3 tomato plants.  I don't know where the 4th one went.  One morning it was just not there! 

some of the tomatoes harvested from this year's garden

The watering got rid of the blossom end rot.  The skies opened up and we've had enough rain to make the garden and weeds grow.  A couple of weeks ago I harvested enough tomatoes to hot water bath can 3 jars.   Thinking that the rest of the green fruit would possibly not ripen, I picked up a box of tomatoes on sale at the grocery store.  Then I harvested what I thought was a few tomatoes in the garden.   It turned out there was over 1/4 bushel of ripe tomatoes to add to my store bought bounty.

I'd purchased 3 boxes of lids last fall when they were on sale.  I hadn't realized that I'd used most of them on jams, relishes and for the little canning jar bottles of milk that end up in the guys lunch bags when they want cereal for breakfast at work. I had popped out the the local hardware store, where I regularly purchase my supplies because they are a Canadian owned store, with great service.  I had two of the employees tell me that so many people decided to take up canning and preserving this year they had no supplies left, and no idea when they'd get more in.   Hubby came to my rescue by sourcing some at another store and picked them up on his way home from a meeting.  They were expensive though at some like $4.19 a package and he brought me home 4 packages!

Tomatoes are a borderline acid food and thus with a little lemon juice added to make them safe, they can be hot water bath processed.   I've never had luck with cold pack method for tomatoes, so I use the hot pack method.  This requires heating up the tomatoes first and boiling them for 5 minutes to heat them through.  The downside is that heat and chopping start to break down the tomato pectins.  This causes the juices to release and that separation of fruit and liquid in the jars.  It's safe, just looks a bit odd in the jar.

Over 2 days, I processed 30 pint jars (500 mls) of chopped tomatoes.   Yay!

1- Scald, peel and chop the tomatoes.  Put them in a large pot and slowly bring to a boil.  Boil for 5 minutes.

2- Using a canning funnel, ladle the tomatoes into clean, heated jars.

3- Follow the modern directions for hot water bath processing.  This meant for me, adding 1 tbsn lemon juice to each 500 ml jar and hot water bath processing for 35 minutes, timed after the canning kettle came back to a boil after adding the jars.

4-  Let cool over night, remove the bands, wipe down the jars to make sure there is no residual bits of tomato and they aren't sticky.  Write the date either on the jars or lids.  Some people use sticky labels, but I find they are really difficult to remove when you want to reuse the jars.   I write the date on the lid so that I know that the lid has already been used.   Tomatoes don't need an identifier as well because they look like tomatoes, unlike miscellaneous purple jams and jellies :)

5- Store with the ring part of the lids removed  because moisture gets under the rings and can rust the lids on the inside, making them difficult to remove.   Also, if a seal isn't perfect, it will pop and you'll find it before you use that jar.   Without that seal, the contents will go mouldy and toxins may develop.  Nobody wants botulism from their pasta sauce!

Blossom End Rot

We've had a huge issue with Blossom End Rot on the tomatoes in the garden.  The tomato will just keep rotting from the bottom end (where the blossom is), so I've had to pick them all off.    I did hours of research and checking out other people's solutions.   There are a ton of them, and as always when searching the 'net for info, you have to take some of the answers with a grain of salt.

This condition is caused by a lack of calcium. I read about all sorts of solutions to this issue, which included watering the plants with powdered milk, adding calcium antacids, ground egg shells,  calcium chloride waterings, purchasing a box of some sort of remedy, and watering with epsom salts in water.   There were more and some were pretty bizarre.   Here's the thing though, all these solutions were on pages which said, I had this issue and this is what I did, and hopefully it will work.  None of them talked about why the condition happens or said if they were successful in treating it.    I almost tried the epsom salts as I had some in the cupboard.  I didn't though because there is no calcium in epsom salts.  Instead, I kept reading.

Finally I came to an easy to read article from some Ag. department at a U.S. university.  It stated that the issue is not generally a lack of calcium in the soil, but stressing of the plants, which causes the available calcium to be used elsewhere in the plant.    They also explained that it tends to appear in years with a cool, wet spring, followed by some very hot, dry weather.   They also said that it generally fixes itself.   However, an easy fix was to simply water the plants regularly to make sure they aren't being stressed.

It went on to explain that most calcium additions to the soil take weeks or months to break down and become usable, so they aren't generally the immediate solution to Blossom End Rot.   It also said that while many gardeners swear by the efficacy of epsom salts, there wasn't really hard, scientific evidence for this and a soil test would show whether more magnesium was required, which is what epsom salts adds to the soil.  I guess that magnesium might help with the calcium uptake.

After this, I put away the epsom salts (not really, it's still sitting here beside me), and took out my hose.  I've been watering the tomato plants, and cukes and pepper plant, because they are all susceptible to Blossom End Rot.   I've been giving them a lot of water and lo and behold, after only a couple of days, my tomatoes were growing rot free.   It really did happen that quickly.  

We've had only a couple of light rains, and since I've heavily mulched that part of the garden with a lot of straw.  The straw helps keep soil borne diseases from the plants, keeps the weeds down and mulches the soil to hold in moisture.  The problem is of course that the straw compacts and then that rain doesn't making it down to the soil, unless it's a heavy rain.  I've pushed away a bit of straw near the stems and am watering directly to the soil.     I'm thrilled with the simple solution.  Now, if only they will ripen about 3 or 4 canning jars full at a time!