The U-Pick Fields are bumping with loads of tomatoes and mild, sweet, and spicy peppers. We are open to the public. Check here for details.

Admission to our U-pick patch is free. We’ll provide you with pint containers for cherry tomatoes, boxes for larger amounts of tomatoes and peppers (tomatoes and peppers are sold by the pound), or you can bring your own bags and/or boxes.

Attention Food Savers!! This is a great time to get your canning or freezing on! Here and here are a couple of great small scale recipes you can make now and freeze. Both these recipes easily double or triple and won’t take up too much freezer space.

If you like bigger projects like canning (like me! I love to can) I want to give you canners or wanna-be canners a visual idea of the amounts you need for a canning batch, and what those amounts will yield, here you go;

Here is a 20 pound box of paste tomatoes and 3 pounds of peppers. I made 6 quarts and 2 pints of rich tomato sauce.

One of my favorite and quickest and easiest canning projects is to can salsa. You only need about 6 pounds of any kind of tomatoes and a few peppers and garlic or onions and a few herbs. There is loads of information and recipes on the internet on ‘how to’ can salsa. It might seem daunting, but really canning is a pretty easy, quick and satisfying project. You’ll be so happy to have your own salsa this winter.

These 6 pounds of tomatoes made 4 pints and 2 half-pints of salsa. It always blows my mind how a few tomatoes and peppers turned into salsa can give me so much joy in the winter.

We have loads of peppers in the field too, the plants are literally dripping with them.

The plants are super easy to pick and we have a great variety of both spicy and sweet peppers. I love to can pickled peppers.

Here are a couple of my favorite resources and recipes for canning peppers.

I also like to freeze peppers. Here is a blog I did a while back on freezing some summer crops. Scroll down a little to get to the pepper freezing method.

Fall is in the air and the summer crops are at their peak, get out this weekend and grab some! Yippeee for putting up food for winter!!

Mo