Puttering In The Garden

From Tomatoes to Pizza Sauce

Yesterday, my partner and I harvested over 100 tomatoes from our vegetable garden. Those 100+ tomatoes came from just two plants! One was an early girl tomato and the second plant was a big beef tomato. The second picture above shows the early girl plant. It doesn’t look like it has a lot of tomatoes in this picture, which was taken before our harvest, but there were dozens of tomatoes hidden underneath the branches of this plant. And this is the second harvest of tomatoes we have gotten from our two tomato plants. We picked about 30 tomatoes from them about a month ago. We also picked carrots, onions, and 2 ears of white corn from our vegetable garden.

We spent most of the day turning our tomatoes, carrots, and onions into a basic tomato sauce, and then into pizza sauce using this recipe. The pizza sauce turned out really well. I think it is the best pizza sauce I have ever tasted. It is much more flavorful than the store bought pizza sauces we typically buy. I’m sure that’s at least partly because our home grown tomatoes are sweeter and more tender than most commercially grown tomatoes.

After spending over 6 hours cooking the sauce, we then made our own pan-fried pizza with the sauce. It was delicious. We also ate our home grown white corn, but the corn was a big disappointment. Although it was large like grocery store corn, it was also just as tasteless. Last year, we grew bi-colored yellow and white corn, which was much more flavorful. I plan on growing bi-colored corn again next year.

Pizza sauce made using this recipe is really versatile. We use it on pasta and in other Italian dishes. Because we made so much sauce, I felt that the best way to preserve the sauce for months to come was to can it.

I sterilized several jars by running them through the dishwasher. After adding the pizza sauce, I boiled the jars in a pot of boiling water for about 12 minutes to sterilize them. We filled 14 jars with pizza sauce, as you can see in the last picture above. I am not sure if these will keep for long at room temperature, because we did not add an acidifying ingredient, so I am planning on refrigerating or freezing these jars.

August 16 2009 | Corn and Tomatoes | No Comments »

Fast Growing Corn

I planted the corn in this picture back in mid-April when it was about two inches high. Corn has been one of the fastest growing plants in our raised bed vegetable garden this year. It has grown particularly fast in the past month. It is already about four feet tall, even though it’s getting crowded by nearby tomato and bean plants that I planted the corn too close to. The fastest growing plants in our garden this year have been pole beans (behind the corn in the picture), corn, tomatoes, and zucchini.

I planted a sweet white variety of corn this year. I tend to prefer the white corn varieties over the yellow corn varieties, because I have found that white corn is usually sweeter. Last year, I grew a bi-colored yellow and white corn variety which turned out to be very flavorful and buttery.

Our tomatoes and beans are also growing vigorously and crowding our nearby peppers and eggplants. The peppers and eggplants haven’t been growing very much. I think that’s because they are not getting enough sun. Perhaps, they don’t have enough root space either. I really underestimated how large some of these fruit/vegetables would get. Next year, I will try to have more restraint by setting out fewer plants.

June 28 2009 | Corn | No Comments »