My First Tomato Preservation

So our Roma tomatoes have finally started ripening like mad, so I have been trying to figure out how to use all the tomatoes I have been picking. A few days ago I canned the whole tomatoes you see in the top picture, which consist of about half Roma and half Juliet tomatoes, with a few Early Girl and Better Boy thrown in.

On Friday, I picked about 13 pounds of tomatoes, mostly Roma. Not everything is completely ripe when I pick it--some go in a paper sack and wait a few days before I can use them--so the bowl shows all of them I had ready to be used on Friday. After spending hours laboring over them, I ended up with four measly pints of spaghetti sauce and two pints of tomato juice. It really makes you appreciate just how cheap our food is...I don't even want to imagine what the cost per jar for this spaghetti sauce would be once you factor in all my garden expenses and labor.

Anyway, there is something fulfilling about making things myself, even if I can only justify the expense by calling it a hobby.