The first round of tomatoes for ketchup was over 50#. Some of that went to tomato soup and I only got 14 pints. I’d wanted between 30 – 36. So I ordered 2 more 20# boxes of red tomatoes. These are the ripe ones ready for blanching.
These are the 15# that were too green to use. They are in front of the front door to ripen. I’ll turn them into tomato soup. I got 3# from my garden that were ripe enough, so I had 28# for ketchup.
We’d gotten about 15 of these giant peppers to use with the 40#. I’d still have 3 left over, due to the reduced tomato weight.
I picked more onions than this but only cleaned up this many for the 28# weight. These are Walla Walla Sweet onions.
I had all the vegetables washed and was all set-up when my helper friend arrived at 8:30AM. We started blanching tomatoes and he did the cutting. I peeled skins, blanched and cooled, and ran the Squeezo.
As soon as I’d fill a pot I’d put it on the stove to start cooking. By 10AM we had the 3 pots going and were chopping peppers and onions. It makes such a difference having someone who can chop quickly. These 3 pots were fully loaded by noon. The last time I did ketchup by myself it wasn’t until 4PM that I got them going. I must go slowly with knives with the poor hand control.
I finished the 18 pints around 7PM. I got nice thick ketchup this time!
On Wednesday my intern returns. She’s been off gallivanting and in quarantine and doing drivers ed but now she can start coming on Wednesdays again.
I plan to start the South garden I was going to do last Friday but was too wiped out. It should be fun cleaning it out and planning what to plant.