Betsy Homemaker - preserving the last tomatoes

I'm boiling up the last of the tomatoes into pasta sauce. It's been a bad year for tomatoes- very slow to ripen and attacked by late blight. Ed's harvested most of the tomatoes green before they were completely spoiled. A month ago we had ample zucchini so I sauced those then, and today's brew contains purple beans. Has turned out well.

I hear they don't recommend bottling anything without a high vinegar or sugar content, but we really don't have the freezer space. Half the idea of growing our own food is to save money so buying a bigger freezer and running it kind of defeats the purpose, if there's other options for storage.

We're leaving the rest of the purple beans to dry out on the vine. We've done this already this season with black beans which dried well and are sitting in the pantry in glass jars. All set for hearty winter soups. Minestrone - yummo!

Mr J and I are about to make banana muffins and, he insists, chocolate muffins. Feeling quite domesticated.