Frost warning

We've been having temperatures below freezing at night, so we are needing to make some concessions to autumn. First, we had to relight the pilot light on the furnace so we don't wake up cold. Especially that little kid who likes to kick the blankets off her bed.

We also had to go pick all the tomatoes a few days ago so they wouldn't go to waste. Good thing I have a helper, it was a big job.

That's the little bowl for the ripe ones. We ended up with 10 gallons of green tomatoes and about 3 gallons of potatoes (we've eaten lots of new potatoes this summer). The beans got left out, and I'm afraid they may have succumbed to the frost last night.

My helper knows her colors well enough now that she can pick off the red tomatoes.
She also knows "tiny" means that's one she can throw. Because a 1/4" tomato isn't really worth trying to save.

Brandywine tomatoes.

Romas

Someone else wants to be a helper, but she hasn't grown thumbs yet. So she just laid around waiting for her kid to get done. She ended up sleeping right up against the gate because we were taking too long.

Yesterday, we (well, I did) decided to do something with those green tomatoes instead of just waiting for them to turn red. I imagine we'll leave a few of them to ripen, but 10 gallons is a lot of tomatoes to be laying around. So I found some recipes for canning green tomatoes and we set off.
Katie helped by picking the stems off some of them.

And we came up with 3 pints of green tomato relish from the first recipe.
I'm really happy with it, so we'll probably make a bunch more. It used up not only tomatoes (but only 14) but also some of the apples from our apple tree, and we've got plenty of those as well, so anything that'll help us make them useful is welcome.

I imagine we'll be canning a lot this week, we have tomatoes, raspberries, crabapples and some other variety of apples to use up, and I am getting comfortable enough with the canning process that it doesn't take all day anymore.