Quote:
Originally Posted by Dak
That's a lot of tomatoes, I'd want an electric one too at that point. (I have to admit I was glad my son was here when I put my Victorio together, w/o him it might have taken me a *bit* longer than it did) Roughly how many plants did you have going to be able to harvest 400 pounds?
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I have about 800 paste/drying varieties with some going for drying and some for paste. Husband dries some also...He likes the blacks dried. I have narrowed down my grow list to the most productive that fit my criteria so we get a lot of tomatoes off of each plant. It is a sprint to get them all picked and used...In Wyoming, I had as many green to ripen indoors as I did vine ripened so the work was spread out a lot more. Bought a used bathtub (scrubbed it REALLY good) to soak the tomatoes in wine for drying.
For my sauce, I try to process enough for 2 five gallon buckets per day. That is all I can handle turning into sauce and cooking down at one time. Takes me about 2 weeks to get all processed, cook the puree down and then add all the other stuff to make my marinara sauce. The actual canning takes me about 2 days. The marinara, because of the meat, peppers, onions and mushrooms in it takes 90 minutes per batch in the pressure canner.
I don't can anything else. My Husband does relish and vegies and salsa and hot carrots. I only grow tomatoes and peppers. He grows everything else. He cans tuna that he catches also...I have no idea why as we go out on the boat and fish about every other day when we are not traveling. I have a 2 freezers full of fish!