First off boil your jars to sterilize them and turn them upside down on a clean towel. Next get your tomatoes ready to go by washing them.



I turned them upside down and cut an X in the bottom of them.



Then I put them in boiling water for about 1 minute.



I scooped them out and peeled off the skin. It comes off real easy if you do this.



Next I cut the tops off and cut them in half so they would fit in the jars.



I put them in the jars leaving about 1 inch at the top. Squish them down so the air pockets dissapear.



Boil the rubber seal lids for about 5 minutes to soften up the rubber.



Screw the lids and rings on hand tight and put them in some boiling water. You have to use a fairly large pot here. A pressure cooker is what a lot of people use for this. There has to be at least 2 inches of water over the top of the jars. They cannot touch the bottom of the pan. Elevate them with a rack if you have it. I didn't have one so I took an old aluminum pie tin and cut holes in the bottom of it and turned it upside down before putting the jars in the boiling water. This way they were elevated from the direct heat.



Let them boil for at least 20 minutes. This sterilizes the tomatoes. Don't leave them too long or you will cook your tomatoes.

Remove them from the boiling water. There are some special canning tongs you can get but I just used regular ones and grabbed the jars with a towel right away and put them on the towel to cool off.



Within a couple of hours as they cool down you will hear a loud click as the lids seal and form a vacuum. They are sealed at this point and ready to be stored away for winter tomato dishes. You can use the handle part of a spoon and tap the tops. The sealed ones will make a click sound and the unsealed ones will make a clunk sound.

NOTE - 2 of my jars didn't seal. I didn't leave these 2 long enough in the boiling water. To fix this you can use the hot pack method instead of the water bath method. I poured the contents of the jars into a sauce pan and got them boiling hot. Then I poured them back into the jars and put the lids and rings back on hand tight. They sealed in about 30 minutes with the click sound. In fact the hot pack method can be used as an easier way to can. You just have to make sure the jars are boiled to sterilize them, the lids are boiled to soften up the rubber rings, and the tomatoes are real hot but not cooked to make the heat inside the jar draws the lid down and make the seal.

Of course salt to taste but I have high bp so I use less or no salt. I hope this helps anyone that wants to can tomatoes.

This was my first attempt at canning peppers. I used hot banana peppers from the garden. Any kind would do I imagine. Credit for this recipe goes to Mrs Aznar. She was my Godfather's mother.

Mrs Aznar's Peppers

This is all you need



Wash and cut off the end and slice the peppers the long way.



Use a spoon to scrape out the seeds and veins from the peppers then put them in icewater for at least one hour.



Into each pint jar put 2 garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon of Kosher salt, 1/4 teaspoon of pickling spice, 1/4 teaspoon of powdered alum, 1/2 teaspoon of sugar, and a tablespoon of oil. Double this for quart jars.

Stuff the iced peppers into the jars. After icing them down they become pretty sturdy and you can stuff them in there pretty hard and tight.



Make a 2 to 1 bath of water to brown vinegar and boil it.



Boil the lids in another pot plain water to soften up the rubber seal.



Pour the boing liquid over the peppers leaving about 1/2 inch of space from the top. Screw the lids and rings on fairly tight and shake up all the ingredients.



Let the jars sit for a couple of hours until the lids form a vacuum and store them away for later.

It's getting over 100 here now almost every day. My garden will burn up so I put a shade over it. It was cheap. $1.25 for 10 foot pvc pipe. 28 cents for connectors. 89 cents for corner connectors. $29.00 for a roll of sun screen that is 6 ft wide by 20 ft long. Plastic lock ties were cheap too. I guess you can tell I'm cheap too. Here's what I made



3 plants are almost 7 feet tall now. I'm 6'4" and they are taller than me. My Early Girls do me proud every year.





I'm getting some good size ones but it's early



The Sweet 100's are putting out a lot.



I still have a lot of yellow flowers.



The Sweet Banana Peppers are doing good. This weekend I am going to try to can some of them. I need to get the mason jars and lids.





I have a recipe franmarz gave me. I'll post it this weekend.

Most of the tomato plants are over the top of the cages except for 2. One Early Girl just didn't take off like the other 2 did. I need to till real bad as you can see.



This Early Girl has about 20 small green tomatoes on it so far.



These 2 Sweet 100's have hundreds of yellow flowers and quite a few marble size tomatoes.



I need to get some twine and prop up the branches that have gone through and are hanging near the ground so I can till in between the plants.



The hot banana and sweet banana peppers are coming in now. These won't quit producing until September or later if I keep them watered.



These peppers really put out a lot.



In about a month I'm going to rig up some kind of sun screen so that the tomatoes don't completely burn up by the middle of July. That's what usually happens in years past. I'm looking for canning jars to be on sale fairly soon. This will be my first attempt at canning. Franmarz gave me an old recipe for pickled banana peppers that are crunchy because you use alum.

The garden is starting to take shape. The plants have been in the ground for one month now.



A couple of the Sweet 100 plants





One of the Early Girls



A Big Boy which says it will yield 1 to 2 pound fruits. This I have to see to believe. 2 pound tomatoes ? Come on. That's hard to believe.



Another view



A hot banana pepper plant



My pepper plant row



I stopped pinching off the yellow flowers now because the plants are getting to be a good size. I started using Miracle Grow for Tomatoes instead of the Sam's tomato food. It does seem to work a lot better. It has 18 percent nitrogen, 18 percent phosphate, and 21 percent soluable potash which makes the plants bloom. This plus pinching off the yellow flowers until the plants are good size end up making a nice yield. This will be the first year that I try and can tomatoes. Any tips on canning ?

She was just a few months old here.



A couple of years have passed by now and Mrs Brownie decided that she wanted to have a family of her own.



Her babies are 2 days old now.



She's a very protective Mom as all Mom's are.



This guy is my favorite.



If there are any Central Tx DU'ers that want a puppy in 8 weeks PM me. We currently have Glacier, Charlie, Scott, Dot, Prissy, Brownie, and her 8 babies. Fourteen dogs are too many. These puppies are very adorable.

I have had the plants in for 2 weeks now. I buy the plants that are about a foot tall and bury the entire thing except for an inch or two. This makes more roots. I pick off the yellow flowers until the plant is about two and a half or three feet tall. My grandfather used to do that when I was a kid and it does work. It shocks the plant and it grows more than double the amount when it makes flowers again. I hit them once a week with some weak Miracle Grow and when they get big enough to let the flowers bloom I switch to Miracle Grow for tomatoes. It has potash I believe that makes more blooms. I already have tilled in chicken manure compost before I even began. Anyways here is what I have so far:



Side view:



One of my Sweet 100's



One of the Early Girls:



One of 6 Hot Banana pepper plants:



Hot Banana peppers make a salsa that is really good. The flavor seems to be more garden fresh than jalapenos. I've grown both. I have 2 sweet Banana pepper plants also. These are great to fry up in olive oil to put on Italian sausage sandwiches.

I didn't have a good harvest last year trying to grow them in buckets. This is from the year before. Homegrown tomatoes kick ass. I am going to try to can them in the mason jars this year. Is the hot pack method the easiest ?

This year he didn't accept frozen meat until Feb. He does a heck of a lot of business. You actually have to make an appointment to drop off meat because of his storage space. Here's what I got:



The top left is dried - cured. It's like what you would call jerky sticks. Bottom left is 50 - 50 smoked sausage. The skinny long one is hard salami. The one on the right is jalapeno - cheese summer sausage. That's new this year. I like it the best. Next year I'll get more of that and less of the 50 - 50. I took some to work and everybody went apeshit over it. My favorite right here:



I didn't get my 5 this year. I only got 4. Between that and backstraps in the freezer I'm in good shape on deer meat until opening day in Nov.

Corned beef on rye is a great lunch sandwich. I made the corned beef this time in the crock pot. It was more tender than boiling the heck out of it.