Dividing Hostas

I took terrible photos, but I want to be sure to document that this was the first time I ever divided perennials.  We've got lovely rows of hostas along our front sidewalk, but there's one very large one that doesn't match the rest, and takes up a lot of the sidewalk by mid-summer. 

 

Since the area under the tree in the front yard is in pretty poor shape--weedy, with very sparse ferns and lilly of the valley--I thought it might be good to move the big hosta to that area.

 

 

I found out that it is really tough to dig up a hosta!  So I only took a few chunks, and I'll have to move the rest of it next year.  I'm not sure if it was the hosta roots or the tree roots that made the job so challenging, but it was a bear.

 

Here are the locations of the six babies I moved further back under the tree.  I'm not doing the best job of keeping them watered, but hopefully they'll survive the winter and we'll have a renewed landscape next year!

 

Canning Tomatoes

The next night, I decided to try canning the rest of the full-sized tomatoes.  This is my first attempt at canning tomatoes, and only my third attempt at canning, period.  Previous efforts with pickles and pear butter were somewhat disappointing.

 

I turned to the internet, and found some instructions that seemed reasonable from the National Center for Home Food Preservation.  I reviewed their instructions on Using Boiling Water Canners, along with the instructions at the beginning of my Ball Home Canning Basics book.  Then I followed their instructions for Canning Crushed Tomatoes.

 

The longest part of this whole process is getting the big canner full of water to boil.  Maybe next time I should try putting smaller pots of water on all four burners to boil, then combining them in the canner.  It took what seemed like hours to get that thing going. 

 

In the meantime, I started preparing tomatoes.  I had never blanched tomatoes before.  I thought it was kind of fun.  I used a fine mesh strainer to dip about five tomatoes at a time into boiling water for a minute or two, then into cold water with a few ice cubes for another minute.  Since I was doing them only five at a time, this was pretty time consuming, too.

 

 

Blanching was followed by peeling and quartering.  I wasn't sure if I should seed them, so I mostly left the seeds in, whenever they didn't just fall out.

 

 

At some point I had boiling water in the canner and all my tomatoes cut and ready.  I boiled my jars and lids for 10 minutes, and got the tomatoes started cooking on the stove.  When it was finally time to fill the jars, I took a few liberties.

 

First, I'm not 100% sure I had the exact correct amount of head space.  Here's hoping I got close enough.

 

Second, the folks at Ace Hardware up the street (where I had picked up my jars earlier that night) had assured me that I didn't need to add extra lemon juice or citric acid to get to the required level of acidity.  Since they didn't have these thngs and I didn't want to make an extra trip to a grocery store, I decided to believe them.  They told me the worst thing that could happen is that I'd smell that a jar had gone bad and have to throw it out--I was in no danger of accidentally eating botulism-laced tomatoes.

 

Finally, I processed the jars for 35 minutes according to the recipe.  I gave a few extra minutes for good measure.

 

Here's my final product.  Several hours of work, and what seemed like a massive bounty of tomatoes, cooked down to four and a half jars of crushed tomatoes and one freezer bag of oven-roasted cherry tomatoes.  (For the professionals among my readers, don't worry, that half-jar didn't get processed, it's sitting in my fridge to be used this week).

 

Oven-dried cherry tomatoes

With all this bounty at once, some preserving needed to be done.  I decided to oven-dry the cherries.  I've never had good luck oven-drying full-sized sliced tomatoes. I loosely followed some instructions on a blog called "Our Best Bites."  I didn't bother with any garlic, just sliced the tomatoes in half, tossed with some olive oil and a little salt, and placed them skin-side down in a non-stick foil-lined cookie sheet. 

I roasted them at 325 degrees for somewhere around two hours.  Some of the bigger ones were still pretty moist, but it was after 10pm and I needed to go to bed (also my excuse for no photos)!

I made the mistake of dumping all of the varieties together.  If I had kept them sorted by size and then roasted each size on a different cookie sheet, I could have removed each sheet from the oven at exactly the right level of dry but not charred.

I let them cool on the cookie sheet overnight, then dumped them into a freezer bag and froze them in the morning.

Garden Bounty

This summer was so hot and dry that even with regular watering, most of our garden was pretty pathetic.  Of the 20+ tomato plants we planted, maybe six of them produced.  It was a disappointing year, so we neglected the garden from about mid-July on. 

 

Last weekend, I finally went out to find a harvest that didn't disappoint.  I picked an entire bowl of miscellaneous cherry tomatoes (Indigo Rose and Jelly Bean were probably the most prolific, although neither were the most flavorful).  I also got a whole bowl of one of the roma-looking tomatoes.  It may be Viva Italia.  Then there were a variety of small-ish purples and yellows.  I can't be sure which variety these were.  Everything gets so tangled, whatever markers are left are hard to pair with actual fruits.

 

There were also a few tomatillos, but hardly enough to even make a batch of salsa with.  The red onions were kind of fun this year, but they were pretty small.  A few peppers have come in as well.