August is Applesauce and Vinegar Month

 The apple harvest is at hand. 

It's been a good year for apples, and that has meant my afternoons are spent making and canning applesauce. 

I'm made applesauce two different ways in the past. The first is to quarter the apples, simmer them till tender, then run them through the food mill. But then I learned how to make vinegar, and changed my prep method to save the peels and cores for making apple cider vinegar. 

The peels and cores go into a glass gallon jar, covered (submerged) in water, and allowed to ferment.

After a couple of weeks I'll strain off the new vinegar, jar it, and lid the jars to let it ferment a few weeks more. It will keep until we use it. The leftover peels and cores are fed to the goats.

The peeled and cored apples are simmered with a bit of water until soft.

Apple chunks simmered to softness with a cinnamon stick.

Once the apples are cooked, I can either puree them in the blender for smooth applesauce, or mash them with a potato masher for chunky applesauce.

The apple puree is scraped into another gallon jar. I work on this several hours every afternoon and when I have a gallon's worth, I sweeten if needed and add water or juice for applesauce consistency. Then I water bath can it in quart jars.

2026's first batch of canned applesauce.

Elderberry harvest is in progress as well, and the first of the muscadines are beginning to ripen. Cheesemaking continues, although production is slacking off. Busy days ahead. 

What's everybody else up to? Staying busy, or staying cool?

August is Applesauce and Vinegar Month 

© Aug 2026 by Leigh at https://www.5acresandadream.com

Pizza Sauce: New Recipe!

Why pizza sauce? Why not tomato sauce, or pasta sauce, or marinara? I suppose because pizza is the main thing I use it for! Spaghetti sometimes, or ravoli, or lasagna. Well, sometimes with gnocchi and meatballs, but mostly on pizza. And this year, I'm using my new recipe. 

You may recall that last year, after I purchased my power blender, I discovered fresh tomato sauce. Until then, I didn't know that a blender could pulverize the skins and seeds which would automatically thicken the sauce. My previous method called for a day of running the tomatoes through my Roma juicer and then three days or so cooking it down in my slow cooker. Then finally, the next day I could can it. So that was roughly five days worth of tomato processing and sauce making and preserving. With this method, I can get the whole thing done in an afternoon! What a savings of time! And of electricity for cooking it down. 

What I wasn't sure about, was how well my new method would work with frozen tomatoes. I tend to toss extra tomatoes into the freezer, and after I get several full gallon bags of them, I pull them out, defrost them, drain them (saving the water), and make sauce. 

Tomato tip: Frozen tomatoes peel super easy as they defrost,
meaning you don't need gallons of boiling and ice water!

Freezing, though, tends to toughen the skins, and I wondered if that would be a problem for the texture of the sauce. I really didn't feel like spending all day with my manual juicer though, so I decided to experiment. 

Result? No problem! All that was left was to season, heat and can it!

Liquefied thawed tomatoes.

For the sauce seasoning, I tried another experiment. I simply added chopped onion and fresh herbs to the last batch of tomatoes going into the blender. 

Raw onion and fresh oregano and rosemary.
I also added salt, 1/2 teaspoon to each pint jar.

Then it's heating the sauce to a boil and water bath canning as usual.

What's really noteworthy, is how the blender sauce looks compared to the cooked down method. 

On the left is a jar of last year's pizza sauce, made by cooking it
down for several days. On the right is the fresh blender pizza sauce.

I had some left over that didn't quite fill the last jar, so that night we tried it on gnocchi and meatballs. No picture, but I can assure it it was delicious. The rest went onto Friday night's pizza. I did get a photo of that!

I love that our homemade pizzas have at least some homegrown
ingredients. On this one, it's the sauce, mozzarella, and the pepper.

This method is definitely a keeper! Faster, easier, and so much tastier. The only thing I will do differently in the future, is to make sure the little stems are removed from the cherry tomatoes before I pop them into the freezer. Slicing tomatoes should be cored before freezing. Those two things will make sauce making even faster. 

I also wanted to mention the bonus by-product, i.e. the drained water from the frozen tomatoes. It's not juice, but it's quite tomato-ey in flavor, so I don't waste it. Part of it went as liquid for canning black turtle beans. The rest I canned on it's own and labeled it "tomato broth."

Canned tomato broth

I use it for soup or to make tomato gravy or Spanish rice. 

What's everyone else doing with their tomatoes? 

Pizza Sauce: New Recipe! © Aug 2023

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Homestead Summer in Photographs

I can't believe it's August! Seems like Juneteenth was only the other day. 

Detail from my Christmas gift from my daughter-in-law

Here's our summer so far in photographs.

Summer squash blossom with pollinators

Fresh goat milk mozzarella

Hopniss vines on the hoop house

Rose of Sharon

Kudzu vines to dry for goat hay

Ricotta cheese from the mozarella whey

Cover crop for soil biomass

Mosul in his anti-mating apron (so he could stay with the girls longer)

more dill pickles

the last of this summer's blueberries

sweet potato flower

Jenny B and her 3-month-old poults

Sewing room progress: homes for weaving yarns and books

Greenhouse progress: trim for the first door

Newest additions: second batch of late July ducklings (five, total)

How's everyone else's summer coming along?

Homestead Summer in Photographs © Aug 2023

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Experiments in Ketchup Making

Chevon and grilled onion sandwich with oven fried potatoes, and homemade ketchup.

We don't eat a lot of ketchup. In fact, I'm the only one who eats it and that's just once a week on my grilled Sunday hamburger. But with all our extra cherry tomatoes, I wanted to give ketchup making a try. I'm calling this an experiment because there is still a little tweaking I want to do. I'm putting all my notes here, so I'll remember what I did, what I want to do differently, and why.

The recipe I used was based on a video by Living Traditions Homestead. What intrigued me was that she used whole tomatoes. She cored them, chopped them, and cooked them with with the other ingredients before running them through her Vitamix blender. What could be easier than that?

I had questions though, because I'd need to use frozen cherry tomatoes instead of large fresh ones. It seems like freezing them toughens the skins, plus, cherry tomatoes are seedier than regular size tomatoes. Would it work as well? I was willing to give it a try and see what I got.

The ingredients in the following recipe are based on the recipe in the video, but adjusted for the amount of tomatoes that I had (fresh plus thawed).

Ketchup

8½ lb  defrosted cherry tomatoes, drained 

1 cup chopped onion

1 cup vinegar (I used my pear vinegar)

3/4 cup sugar (originally 2/3 cup but increased after taste tasting)

1½ tbsp canning salt 

3 cloves chopped garlic

1/4 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp celery seed

1/2 tsp mustard seed

I simmered it all together for several hours and then allowed it to cool. Then I blended batches of it in my new blender.

First batch before blending.

The skins blended quickly but the teeny tiny seeds took some time. The process might have been quick with regular tomatoes and regular tomato seeds, but the miniature seeds were more of a challenge (and I was impatient).

After blending. Smaller batches did a much better job on the seeds.

We sampled it that night for dinner with French fries. Our cherry tomatoes are more acidic than our slicing tomatoes, so one thing we agreed on was that it needed more sweetener (notated in my recipe above). Dan didn't mind the remaining seeds, but I didn't like them. So, before I canned the ketchup I removed the seeds with a fine sieve and spatula.

A lot of people make their ketchup this way. I found it quicker
 and less messy than using my hand juicer (especially clean up).

To can: hot back jars leaving 1/4" 1/2" headspace (I had too many failed seals with 1/4" and had to re-do those). Water bath process for 15 minutes for both pints and half-pints. My yield was 6 pints.

Noteworthy

About a week later, I put a picking of cherry tomatoes into the dehydrator for making tomato powder.

Dried cherry tomatoes.

Tomato powder. Do you see any seeds?

The dried seeds powdered right along with the skins and pulp. Hmm. Did cooking the whole tomatoes soften the seeds so that they didn't blend well? Or did drying them make them brittle enough to powder well? That lead to another experiment. What would happen to the seeds if I blended raw cherry tomatoes?

 

Fresh cherry tomatoes in the blender

After blending. Looks thick and creamy, doesn't it?

The real test was looking for seeds!

If any little seed fragments are there, I can live with it! Plus!!!
It's about thick enough to be sauce; just needs a little seasoning.

I'm guessing that the raw and dried seeds were firm enough to be pulverized in the blender, but the cooked down tomato seeds were too soft and slippery for some of them. Based on several videos that I watched, I don't think that's strictly true of larger tomatoes with larger seeds, but it seems to be true of the tiny, seedy, Matt's Wild Cherry Tomatoes.

Umm, so, why have I been spending hours and hours every summer juicing tomatoes, and days and days cooking down the juice to make sauce? NO MORE! This is completely changing the way I will make my pizza sauce next year! And all because I wasn't satisfied with the way my ketchup turned out. 

Experiments in Ketchup Making © Sept 2022

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Garden Notes: August 2022

 Rainfall

• 1st: 0.35"
• 3rd: 0.125"
• 4th: 1"
• 7th: 0.8"
• 11th: 0.9"
• 17th: 0.1"
• 19th: 0.5"
• 21st: 0.7"
• 26th: 0.1"
• Total: 4.575"

Temperature

• nighttime range: 68-75°F (20-24°C)
• daytime range: 78-94°F (25.5-34.5°C)

No complaints about August weather. We had good rainfall and generally cooler daily temperatures than July. We only saw 90s during the first and last weeks of the month. On the other hand, the higher humidity meant that it felt just as bad as the 90s! What really helps is when it gets down to below 70°F (21°C) at night because we can cool the house down, making it more tolerable during the day.

State of the garden

All I can say is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Everything is overgrown and runaway so that it looks a mess. But almost everything in it is useful!

Here we have cherry tomatoes, watermelon, mangels, horseradish,
celery, lambs quarter, sweet potatoes, raspberries, cowpeas, landrace 
brassicas, morning glory, a couple of carrots, and a potato plant or two.

Hoophouse: The living shade you see is hopniss, cherry tomatoes, and morning glories.

Also a volunteer winter squash, cultivated grape, and Chinese yams.

My largest sweet potato squash so far.

Inside the hoophouse are winter squash, Malabar spinach, violets,
strawberries (back right bed) and cultivated burdock (back left bed.)

Hugelkultur: winter squash, turtle beans, cherry tomatoes,
chicory, clover, morning glories, lambs quarter, & sunchokes.

Hugelkultur closeup featuring squash and chicory.

African keyhole garden: sweet potatoes and a survivor kale.
The porch trellis is growing green beans and cherry tomatoes.

I planted kale in the keyhole bed about a year ago. This is one of
two plants that survived both our cold winter and hot summer.

Picking and Preserving

Bucket full of cherry tomatoes, a few okra, and one lone pepper.

The cherry tomatoes are still going gangbusters. I got bored with making and canning pizza sauce, so I'm switching to tomato juice and ketchup.

The cucumbers are done, so our salads, now, are cherry tomatoes and kale.

Tomato, kale, and black olive salad
with homemade ricotta ranch dressing.

The okra hasn't been very productive. 

Okra is a member of the hibiscus family.

I don't plant a lot, just enough to have oven-fried okra a couple times a week during growing season, with a little extra to freeze for a side dish during winter. It hasn't produced that much, although it's making a better effort now that our daily highs aren't so scorching and we're getting a little more rain.

August is fig month, and these are the largest figs we've ever seen on our trees.

They aren't all this size, but it's amazing to find them. Can't take any credit, though, because the fig trees are pretty much on their own! They are next to the goat barn, so perhaps they're getting some rich rain runoff.

Breakfast: fresh figs on peanut butter granola with
kefir. Sometimes we swap the figs for diced pears.

There were lots to can.

And dessert!

Fresh fig cake with vanilla goat milk ice cream.

Pear harvest started in late July. The heaviest harvest was a couple weeks ago.

Bucket of pears.

One year, I spent days in the kitchen canning chunked pears, but Dan wasn't very enthusiastic about them. So now, I just make pear sauce. It's easier and faster to do, and we both like it.

Cinnamon pear sauce.

As pear picking slows and the pearsauce jars fill, I switch to drying them. Ditto for figs.

 

The cores and peels are being made into vinegar.

Elderberry harvest starts in late August.

First of the elderberries.

I used the first of them to flavor my canned figs and pearsauce. I also freeze them for jelly making this winter, and will make a couple batches of elderberry wine. This year I want to try an elderberry pear wine. I've experimented with adding other fruits for subtle flavor (of which some are more likable than others).

And a few parting shots.

Buckwheat planted as a cover crop in my newest swale bed.
Only a few plants came up, so this will be my seed crop.

Marigolds and a winter squash blossom.

Our first Orange Glo watermelon of the summer.

I picked the watermelon just the other day. They were planted late, and only after my cantaloupe plants all died. I'm not sure what happened to them. They were doing well until our hot dry spell. I watered them faithfully, but they weren't happy and that was that. The watermelons have done much better and we're just starting to enjoy them.

So there are the pictures to go along with my Summer Mantra blog post. I liked hearing about what you all have been up to in your gardens, so keep the comments coming. 😀

Garden Notes: August 2022 © August 2022

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com