Chili Sauce

I harvested more tomatoes yesterday, a shopping bag of Italian Heirloom and one of John Baer. With the John Baer that were in the refrigerator from last week, we had about half a bushel. We now have a fair number of quarts of canned tomatoes. I thought it would be good to make something else. I remembered loving my mother's tomato chili sauce. Of course, it is always the case; the recipe you want from your mother went with her when she passed.

I found the following recipe on cooks.com.

1 peck tomatoes
9 green peppers
6 med. size onions
3 c. sugar
3/4 c. salt
1 doz. med. red peppers
1 qt. vinegar
3 tsp. cloves, ground
3 tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. nutmeg
2 tsp. ginger

The half a bushel of tomatoes meant we had two pecks. Kathy wants one for straight tomato sauce. So I did the homemade chili sauce. I substituted 2 poblano peppers for the med. red peppers. Then cooked it for at least four hours. It yielded 10 pints.


If I were to do it again, i might cut the spices and vinegar a little. It is pretty strong stuff. And I don't think it is a full duplication of what my mother made, which was pretty mild by comparison. Still, a generally good use of extra tomatoes.

One last comment: This allowed us to compare the processing differences between the John Baer and Italian Heirloom varieties. The Italian Heirloom are much, much larger. But, they are also a bit more unwieldy. The skin of the John Baer just slips off when parboiled. The John Baer also have less pith in them, making it easier to keep most of the fruit when you take out the stem. They just don't grow as big. They also tend to bleach when they get too much sun.

Processing Tomatoes

This is the time of the year when tomatoes get ripe. It's pretty obvious, but it always catches us a bit off guard. Because it's not just that they are ripe, it's that they must be processed while they are still in their prime or they are wasted.

Kathy went to Toronto last week in the midst of the period of first ripening. I grow the food, but I can't process it without her. Not that I couldn't, I just find myself adrift trying to manage it alone. It is a team task. Fortunately, before the fruit went bad, she returned and we got busy. This is actually the second batch we have processed. The first batch, which we did just before she left, we skinned and put into quart-sized tubs in the freezer. What is pictured below represents a little more than we did then. I also got some tomato juice out of the left over drippings. Pretty tasty stuff!


There are more to do. We had a bumper crop of Italian heirlooms, most of which probably weighed a pound each. You can get a lot done with fruit that size. The tomatoes pictured below are John Baer variety. I was afraid that nearly all would be lost to blossom rot, but somehow, the majority of fruit I have seen lately has been in pretty good shape. A few blemishes, but not the terrible signs of rot. There were a lot more fruit by numbers, but about half the total volume. I think we will process these into something different. I would love to duplicate my mother's chili sauce. There is no recipe so I need to search around for one. Hers was not spicy in the least, so I am trying to figure out what she had in it.

Blooming Onions

It has been so hot, I have had low motivation to do anything in the garden. Of course, this time of year, you have to pick zucchini daily or they grow too big. I've given up on the yellow squash. I keep wondering why I planted it! Any, there are plenty of tomatoes coming ripe. The Italian Heirloom have done the best, with consistently large fruits of about a pound each. We put some in freezer containers this past week. I'm not sure of the texture or the taste of these yet. We have to try cooking with them first.

One task I have been avoiding has been cleaning out the raised beds that had onions. This morning I finally decided to work until it was too hot to continue and clean out the bed where the yellow of Parma had grown. I clipped off all the blooms. They filled two plastic grocery bags. I'm going to have more seeds than I know what to do with. I guess I will send the ones I don't need to Seed Saver's Exchange. Many of the blooms are not yet ready to release seeds, so I put the blooms aside. However, seeds were dropping from some of the blooms. I got about third of a cup of onion seeds, which I cleaned up a bit by sifting them through a colander.


I presumed originally that the bulbs on the onions that had gone to bloom would be useless, but, as I picked them out of the bed, I realized that the bulbs on many were still rather large. So, I decided to process some.


I extracted the stalk from which the bloom grew from the middle of each and, for some, I chopped the onion up, for others, I cut them in quarters. I got about six quarts to freeze. Putting my work in the freezer, I realized that we still had frozen onions from last year that we haven't used. So, I stopped with six quarts and decided it was too much work. I think I have the best there was to offer anyway; the ones I didn't process were rather small.

Good and Bad Tomatoes

I picked my first tomato today. It was an Italian Heirloom. Large by any standard -- and there are more on the way.


On the other hand, as I suspected from my early examination and as predicted by the pH levels in the bed, I have nothing but blossom rot among the John Baer variety. Such a shame to lose a whole harvest of one variety.

Water Engineering

It took more parts than I thought it would need to make the connector to shuffle water from the air conditioner drain to the water barrel. The pipe was 1/2", but it needed to expand to 3/4" to then connect to a threaded part that would hold the connector to hold the hose. Once it was assembled, I watched it to see if water would start dripping into the barrel. It didn't. I went under the house and found that, like the part on top that I had needed to fix, the bottom connector had been poorly assembled and was leaking inside the house. I fixed it. It only dribbles into the barrel, but I figure that is 6 to9 gallons a day.

Bumbling Beekeeper

I executed the beekeeping plan, only to have a couple of things turn out differently than I had planned. First, there were three frames full of capped brood in the box that was supposed to be devoid of any brood. Second, most of the honey in that box was not capped and therefore not adequately cured.

We did extract honey from one of the brood frames, because the caps had ripped off and it was a mess, but we left the other two frames with brood alone. We extracted honey from the other frames, a little less than a gallon.

I put the box in the bottom position of the swarm hive and put the extracted honey on top of the hive inside a top feeder. It rained a bit in the evening, so I put the fume board on top of it, just slightly askew so the bees could enter and exit but so that it wouldn't get washed out. (I assumed the fumes had all disappeared by that time.) When I checked back, the honey was all gone, so I presume the bees from both hives robbed it and I will get it back if I end up harvesting this year.


I ended up needing two fewer boxes. The frames in the brood box I had placed on when the bees swarmed was not drawn even a little bit. There was a super that had new frames that were modestly drawn, but just barely. Both have come home with me.