I started canning tomatoes from my garden at least 10 years ago. Perhaps 11 or 12 years ago.

At the time I started, I did some research on the Internet and got comfortable with a method of canning that essentially requires the tomatoes to be boiled down and blended into a coulis or semi-sauce consistency (for at least 45 minutes, usually much more – for example, today, I simmered the tomatoes for 3 hours) and then pouring the cooked/blended liquid into sterilized jars with salt and a little bottled lemon juice. This approach puts boiling liquid into hot jars with boiled lids, but does not require boiling the jars once they’ve been filled.

Sometime in the interim, the English Internet got much more concerned about food safety with canning. For example, the USDA Guidelines on Tomato Canning state that all canned tomato preparations need to be processed in a water bath or pressure cooker (even if you’re dealing with a boiled preparation).

But, there are plenty of Internet resources in French and Italian (as well as a few in English) that still swear by this style of canning as what multiple generations of families have historically done with no problems.

After a few years of the annual debate about whether I needed to change my approach because the Internet says so, in this time of COVID-19 stay-at-home, I decided to buy a proper pH meter to figure out if my canned preparations were below the 4.6 pH cutoff of acidity, below which, C. botulinum bacteria cannot grow.

First, I ordered my new science toy. Then, I calibrated the pH meter according to the instructions. At first I thought it may be broken because the distilled water kept testing at a pH below 6 and I thought we all knew that water was supposed to be a pH of 7. Welp, turns out that’s true immediately after distillation, but when it sits around exposed to the atmosphere, distilled water absorbs carbon dioxide and becomes slightly acidic with a pH of around 5.8.

Relieved that my new toy wasn’t broken, I proceeded to test the pH of the raw tomatoes I was going to use to make the sauce — I took 3 samples for most of the tomatoes and there was some variance, even within the same piece of fruit. My pH meter is rated to be correct to within 0.01 pH. Here are the readings:

• White Oxheart: 3.90, 3.83, 3.97
• Snowberry: 3.90, 4.37, 3.96
• Amish Salad: 4.39
• Kentucky Beefsteak: 4.01, 4.15, 4.17
• Golden Globe: 4.61, 4.86, 4.41
• Isis Candy Cherry: 4.51, 4.37, 4.83

After 1 hour of boiling, the sauce tested at 3.96 & 3.99. After 2 hours of boiling, I used the stick blender to break up the remaining chunks of flesh and skins and tested the pH immediately after blending, where it measured 4.09 & 4.08.

After 3 hours of boiling, I tested the sauce and it measured 3.98 & 4.01. At this point, I was feeling pretty good. Since pH is a logarithmic scale. A pH of 4 is significantly more acidic than 4.6.

For fun, I tested the lemon juice and it measured at a pH of 2.54 and 2.53. I put some lemon juice in each of the quart jars as well as some salt, filled the jars, and then stirred the mixture in each jar with a chopstick before my final pH measurement.

The five quart jars measured 3.95, 3.69, 3.88, 3.85, and 3.78. All well under the 4.6 danger point. So, I cleaned the rims, put the boiled lids on top, tightened the bands, and turned the jars upside down to cool. I am now very comfortable that the science supports my traditional no-water-bath approach to canning tomato coulis from my garden.

This picture doesn’t do it justice, but we’ve been getting almost equal volume cucumbers to tomatoes in every harvest this year.

Tomatoes are a gift that almost everyone appreciates.  They disappear like magic almost as soon as I start to complain that I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.

Cucumber, on the other hand?  Not so much.

This year, we’ve taken to conditioning gifts of tomatoes upon people taking cucumbers with them.

I’ve also researched cucumber recipes and tried to find more ways to use them.  I’m nowhere near the point where I need to be to take correct use of what my garden is producing.

I’ve seen this pattern in many of my start-ups.  They want to do X.  But it turns out, their business is used by others to do Y.  And now, they have to scramble to deal with the reality that is different than their plans.

Yet again, the garden is a great metaphor for start-ups.

Again, the Garden has great lessons for life.  As I wrote in April, this year, I did quite a bit of early preparation for the garden.  Sometimes, if you work hard, and conditions are just right, you get *really* lucky.  It looks like that’s what will happen with the garden this year.

Here are some of the tomato seedlings and a baby summer squash, immediately after they were planted back in late April.  Thanks to a warm weather prediction, I was able to get all the summer garden plants in the ground 2 weeks before I usually do (to avoid the frost).

Here they are a couple weeks later, after I added the supports.  (The pots contain hot peppers.)

Thanks to a very warm spring and the automatic watering system, I had the lushest June 1 garden I’ve every had.

The squash and basil were producing on the first of the month, so we could enjoy BBQ garden pizzas.

The cucumbers and butternut squash had a similar late spring.  Here they are after planting in late April.

And, here they are by early June (see them climbing the back fence?).

And this is what they look like today.  The cucumbers are producing like mad — I’ve had to resort to giving gift cukes to deal with the volume.  The butternuts are still too young to harvest, but if the early fruits are any indication, this fall should bring the biggest harvest of butternut squashes I’ve ever had.

And the tomatoes?  They are insane.  We’ve never had plants this big with this much fruit before the 4th of July.  We had our first ripe tomatoes on June 22nd!  What a great way to celebrate the first day of Summer (and yes, in an odd coincidence, it was overcast and drizzling that day).

Look at all those fruits just waiting to ripen in the sun!

The heat wave we are currently experiencing in California will only speed the rate of production.  Yesterday’s harvest was awesome — the last of the arugula that had gone to seed, and cukes and squash galore, plus one ripe pink caspian tomato and a few green tomatoes for frying.

I’m looking forward to a tomato-tacular summer!

It’s almost that time of year again!

Back in January, I started seeds for tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and okra.

The okra died. I restarted them a few weeks ago and they seem much happier.

Today, the garden is a sad dried out, over-grown and gone-to-seed collection.

The peppers had seed leaves by the end of January.

But the tomatoes, despite being planted several weeks later, have completely overtaken the peppers in terms of growth.

Just a bit of labor to harvest the remaining bits (yay beets!), then we turn the beds, add compost, fertilize, and it will be a welcome home to all of the seedlings that are thrilled at this weekend’s blazing sun.

Hurray for the coming summer garden!