When I was a little girl, my grandma had a wonderful home garden. I remember cucumbers growing on the vine, picking string beans that climbed up tall lengths of string and of course lots and lots of plump tomatoes. Back then vegetables were something I enjoyed picking and admiring, but very few passed my lips. Thankfully that has changed and today I can’t get enough of homegrown harvests.
I have fond memories of grandma’s little jars of homemade strawberry preserves covered with a paraffin wax that you had to dig out before you could enjoy that scrumptious taste of summer. Years later I bought my grandma’s house, and though it was literally the same soil, I never had the success she did in the garden. And the closet under the stairs in the basement that held her jars of canned delights became storage for Christmas decorations.
Flash forward fifty some-odd years, and I thought it would be fun to recapture some of those memories by trying my hand at canning. My vegetable garden is a pathetic little attempt at homesteading and my tomato plants have been less that robust, so I went to my local farmstand and purchased 25 pounds of roma tomatoes and left with optimism and a little fear of what lie ahead.
I spent the better part of the day painstakingly washing, blanching and peeling 114 tomatoes (yes, I counted) and as I did, the memories flooded in. I took the task outside and I was suddenly back in my grandma’s yard snapping the ends off of string beans while grandma placed juicy tomatoes fresh off the plants into her gathered apron. The smell of summer oozed out of each tomato as I released them from their skins, and I smiled. I was ethereally connecting to my German farmer roots and I couldn’t be happier.
Using grandma’s old wooden potato masher, I stuffed each jar with fresh tomatoes. Though it took me into the wee hours, I processed all 114 of those delicious orbs. Hopefully I did it correctly and we will be enjoying summer throughout the year. If not…does anyone know the first signs of botulism?
Suggested by Me
Completed 8/23/18