18. August 2010 by admin.

Each August I host a hands-on canning demo day for CSA members. We collect split tomatoes from the plants and can them up in the barn, our impromptu outdoor kitchen right next to the garden.  Now that’s fresh! Here’s Jackie posing with the goods, jars of tomato puree.

The outdoor kitchen stove:

I find it completely satisfying to take split tomatoes from the garden and can a batch of tomato puree for winter use. Its a bit like taking lemons and making lemonade. Sour turns sweet. Split tomatoes or tomato bounty hanging on the vine, you are going to have waste. But add some hard work and you have tomato puree. Wait, its not hard work, but its focused and time-consuming. I’m getting into the zen of canning this month. I think after a few years of it, its an easy process for me. I don’t have to pour over the Ball Book anymore, getting overwhelmed by the choices, the step-by-step details of canning, and the fear paragraphs about germs and botulism. Which, by the way, you can’t taste or see or smell, but enjoy your canning experience, you’ll be fine…

I’ve tried a variety of techniques and products over the past few years, and now I know what I like to do. I like to make tomato puree, a straight tomato base. It can be a soup base. It can simmer longer on the stovetop and become pizza sauce or ketchup. It can be thickened with garlic and onions and other veggies for a pasta sauce or lasagna sauce. I keep it pure and simple when I can it, and then I can add all those goodies later when I’m cooking. Did you know tomatoes are on the edge of acidity? 4.0-4.6, and 4.6 is the limit to safe water-bath canning. Add some lemon juice and you throw it over the edge into higher acidity, where botulism can’t thrive. Add anything else to tomatoes–like herbs and vegetables–and you  could throw it over the other edge, where botulism can survive. So I play it safe, and keep my tomatoes as plain puree. (I know tons of people who add things and continue to live, just sayin’)

I don’t mess around with peeling tomatoes. That process drives me crazy. I quarter them unpeeled, and stew them a bit in a big pot. Then I pour off the water from the tomatoes. This  saves hours of evaporation time during thickening. The stewed, drained-off tomatoes go to Victoria, and come out a bit watery. It takes more simmer time to thicken this way (improved by pouring off the water) but I just saved loads of time and patience by not peeling tomatoes.  So I don’t mind simmer-time. One day I made my puree and left it simmering on the stove (with Phil home to monitor) and I went to yoga. Came home in a couple hours to a nice thick puree ready to can. [Of course, if I don’t have time to thicken it, I’ll can it anyway. It takes more cans and is much more watery, but it’ll still be useful. I’ve also skipped the Victoria and blended the stewed quartered and poured-off tomatoes with skins and all, with an immersion blender. That works too. ]

Meet Victoria (Victoria Mill, that is). She helps us squash tomatoes into juice and puree, spitting out the skins and such.

Elaine and Victoria.

The Super Canner: this baby can fit almost 20 jars at a time. Simply constructed with cinder blocks, a half-barrel (that’s not what its called?) and a blow torch. I need to credit our friends the Horsts at Jehovah-Jireh Farm with this idea. Phil dug a hole to set the blow torch in, the Horsts put an elbow on theirs to shoot it upward, I believe. And they had a sink base. Different ways to do it.

Thirty minutes boiling in Super Canner, and we’re done. Phil’s taking out jars with the Jar Taker Outer. (ok, tongs)

Let those jars rest for a day, so as not to bump them (dare I say…jar them?) before they cool and seal.  Gaze at them. Revel with them. Label them and put them in a pantry or other dark ideally cool-ish space.

Posted in Events, Veggies, On the Farm | 1 Comment »

1. April 2009 by ilene.

Phil took a Bee Keeping Class this winter, taught by Steve Collins at LilyPons. The class met at our farm to pick up their bees and learn how to settle the bees in their new home. We had a potluck lunch together while people “painted” a dot on the queen so they can easily detect her. Pretty neat stuff. Here are the whole classes bees in Steve’s van. Look closely to find the stragglers, who missed the box when they were being dumped into boxes. They travelled to the farm, clinging to the boxes mostly, wanted to get in with the rest of the bees.

This is Steve with a little box special for the queen. Classmates look on.

David observes the bees.

Phil is ready to install the bees.

Phil did a good job installing the bees and giving them a good start. Wish our bees luck!

Hope they will BEE HAPPY on our farm…

Posted in Events, On the Farm | 2 Comments »

20. February 2009 by ilene.

We are feeling very “eastern shore”…we are building a high tunnel hoophouse on our farm this year. Wow, how great this will be! Imagine…tomatoes go straight in the ground as younger plants in April instead of being repotted for another month in the greenhouse. That cuts out a step for us. Early tomatoes ripen in June! And when it rains, the skins of the tomatoes won’t split, because they are protected in the hoophouse. That’s a lot less rot. Watering is done by the drip tape irrigation that we already rely on. And I think we will be able to keep greens growing almost year-round in the hoop for our family, without ever heating this thing.

And a thing it is…30 feet across and 100 feet long. The tractor will fit right inside to work the soil. Its high too, maybe 12 feet? That’s a lot of metal…over 4000 pounds of metal tubing. Lucky us, Phil got an email about a used hoophouse for sale in St Mary’s County last fall. So we bought our hoophouse third hand and for a deal (they are $5-8K new).

So here’s how “shipping” it went–Phil and my dad drove to St Mary’s County (about two hours+ away from Frederick), and rented a U-Haul one way. They drove to the seller’s house, where there were neat little piles of metal pipe, all taken apart by the seller’s teenage son and friend. Paid the kids for disassembly time (what a great offer that was!). Met my uncle there too, he lives near the seller. The three of them (yes, Phil and two hard-working men over 70) loaded the truck with 4000 pounds of pipe. Phil drove the truck home, avoiding the weigh station, and Dad followed in the car. Noah, Dad, Phil unloaded the U-Haul…its still 4000 pounds of piping, again, Phil said.

We had a couple CSA Hoophouse Raising days. Thanks to all who helped move the pipes around! Those were fun days and very productive. Pipes were categorized by length and type (see Hoop Art photos), pipes were balanced on shoulders and relocated to the garden, pipes were inserted in other pipes and then you have the graceful arches of the hoophouse. I went out to the garden one windy day and heard these ghosty whistle sounds, they had a ring to them…the wind was whistling through the pipes like blowing into a bottle!

And yet, there are still piles of pipes on the ground, albeit much less poundage. Lots of reinforcing trusses still need to go up before the end of March. That project is resting while a few other projects take center stage–a trip to Florida (done), delivery of a new Veggie Shed (done, see New Veggie Shed post), prepping the greenhouse for spring seedlings (just finished). And we just started planting early spring seedlings in the greenhouse, so spring is coming soon, I know it.

Posted in Events, Hoophouse, On the Farm | No Comments »