Thursday morning I got an early start. I went out and found 4 more red bell peppers and picked all the rest of the Walla onions and a couple of the storage onions. I got them washed up and started chopping tomatoes to go through the Squeezo.
I did the ones with the bad spots first, then the tiny Juliettes. They took forever. I had 2 helpers coming and when they arrived, I set one to running the Squeezo and the other to chopping peppers and onions while I finished the tomatoes.
We finished with the Squeezo around noon and started cleaning up. I got the sauce started and discovered I’d forgotten to do the garlic. So we got that done and the sauce was going by 12:30. I did the cleanup and sat down for a while, checking the sauce every hour at first, then every half hour.
Just after 4PM it was done and I ran it through the blender then mixed the batches together. I’d started the huge canner with 15 pints in it to sterilize the jars. I figured I’d get 12 pints. I figured wrong.
I fill all those and had a lot of sauce left over. So I got out my tiny canner that holds 7 jars and set that to sterilize the jars while the big canner took 45 minutes to process the 15. I ended up with 4.5 pints of sauce and that finished about 7:30PM. Total for the day: 19.5 pints.
I didn’t clean up the mess, I was too wiped out. That will be Friday’s job. I also have to start prepping for the cider pressing on Saturday. I have a bunch of people coming from 1 – 4PM. I’ve got buckets of apples already to pick over and wash on Friday. If I get that done, I may try to get more apples off the tree and washed ahead.