[z_willus_d]

Hello,

I just purchased an All-American 21 1/2 Qt. Pressure Cooker/Canner, which I intend to employ in the service of canning my tomato harvest this year. I just started getting a trickle of a few ripe tomatoes this past week -- Black Prince, Paul R., Early Girl, etc. -- and I'm already feeling the need to give away an awful lot to keep from wasting the bounty. Well, I'm a greedy gardener too, and so I'm preparing for canning my goods for the winter/spring. I mainly want to can either whole tomatoes or raw sauce that I can fashion to adapt to whatever tomato hot recipe requirements I might have down the road.

Now, I don't really have an incredible number of plants, so I've come to realize that I'm not going to have this point when I have 100's of pounds of tomato matter to process to jars. Rather, I expect I'll get an steady increase in ripe fruit through the next month. I'd like to capture the excess for canning, but I don't want to have to run many many process cycles in the pressure cooker. How do folks usually handle this? Do you make sauce, then store in fridge, then can once enough is accumulated (like after a couple months)? Do you just let the tomatoes get over-ripe on the counter until enough accumulate? Worse, do you refrigerate to build up stock? Are there other ideas? I just hate the idea of having to either a) run 24 cycles of 1 quart canning batches (meaning tons of wasted time and energy) or b) wait until early fall and have only enough tomatoes left to maybe can 3 quarts or the like. There's got to be a better alternative. Please help!

Thanks,
Naysen