Peak tomatoes, corn and beans….

The past couple of weeks we have been at peak production with tomatoes, beans and corn! We are lovin’ the tomatoes while splurging on them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We have also been eating corn almost every day the last couple of weeks. We only harvest 4 times from each succession of corn planted so corn is definitely a delicacy on the farm and it will probably be another 3 weeks before our next succession of corn matures. Our first corn crop was amazing, and like lettuce, it certainly enjoyed the wet weather because it formed beautiful juicy ears.
Our tomatoes on the other hand are grown in our greenhouse so we are able to harvest them for an extended period of time. Probably in a couple of weeks we won’t even want to eat a tomato at breakfast so at that point in the season we will be canning salsa. (We are waiting for the poblanos, anaheims and krimzen lee peppers to mature before making salsa because we like to roast them for our roasted pepper salsa.)
Beans are very labor intensive to harvest and we were fortunate to have a few pounds left over after market this past week so we canned a couple runs for our winter stash. Diane, who is our yoga instructor, has been coming to the farm on Tuesday’s to teach us yoga geared specifically towards picking green beans. YES… Our backs sometimes hurt after picking beans. But I am confident that at some point in time I will learn to pick beans so that I am not stressing my back!
Our goal is to have 3 runs of beans so that we can have one jar of beans every other week throughout the winter, which means we will need to can another run once our next succession of beans matures. We use the “cold pack” technique for our beans which means we just simply snap the ends off the beans then snap the bean into 1 inch long pieces so the beans easily fit into the jars. We then fill the jars with the beans and pour boiling water in each jar leaving around an inch of head space in each jar. Finally, we clean the tops of the jars, put the lids on them, and then place the jars in the pressure canner.
We pressure canned our beans at 12 lbs of pressure for 25 minutes.