Freeze Dryer Errors, Canning Tomatoes, Road Repair, Soak - Tuesday

Not what I like to wake up to. The freeze dryer was dinging it's message tone when I got up and it persisted to be a pain for the morning until I figured out the issue. Nicely it came with a troubleshooting guide for all the various error codes and I was able to find my answers. I had to take the thick gasket off that the door seals against and wash it in the sink before reinstalling it. During this the cycle got stuck on the display so I restarted the freeze dryer which caused me to have to run a new cycle. I found out that I can manually advance the step in the cycle so I was able to bypass the freezing steps and go right to the drying stage it had been at. It had been running for 40 hours when I restarted it and is 22 hours in the new cycle.

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My main task for the day was to can the tomatoes. @stryeyz had dealt with all the large ones that were picked the night before. I took all the bags of cherry tomatoes in the kitchen and dumped them into the kettle and got them heating while I went out to the garden and picked all the tomatoes that were ripe. I got 6 pounds of larger and 4 pounds of cherry.

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The cherry all got dumped into the kettle to cook with the others while I set about blanching the larger I had just picked to remove the skins.

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All of the larger that I had picked were in pretty good condition and I didn't have to hack out that much from them.

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The cherry tomatoes all got strained to remove all the skins and seeds. Given the volume of cherry tomatoes I ended up with a small amount of trash for the birds.

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After straining the cherries I dumped the bow of larger that had been cut up prior into the kettle and got it heating. I then poured the strained in and had a nice full kettle.

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During all of this I got the big kettle filled with water and heating for the hot water bath and kept the tomatoes heating. I did a scald on the jars then filled 7 and put them through the bath for 45 minutes.

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The first batch of jars was done and I had 15 minutes before I needed to go pick J up from school. I managed to get the rest of the tomatoes into 5 jars and into the bath with 2 minutes to spare. Luckily it is a 1 minute drive to the school so I made it easily.

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For the day I ended up with 12 quarts of tomatoes that are now cool and will be labeled and in the pantry. The goal is to have 2 dozen at least so we could use one every two weeks through the next year. With the amount of tomatoes on the plants still I think that will be a very attainable goal.

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When the road crews were working on the road they skiffed some chips when they were filling chip machine but they missed filling in the pot holes.... So I headed out with my rake and shovel to move a bunch of the gravel around to fill the pot holes in myself. Our road is supposed to be country maintained but that really only means it gets plowed. The road surface has largely been under my care.

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While @stryeyz and the boys were at bible study I got to soak and watch some Rick & Morty in the tub until they got home.

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Today I have to pick squash since I didn't yesterday, the cucumbers need picking, there is a frost warning for tonight/tomorrow morning so I have to cover everything susceptible though it is now saying 37F instead of the 34F I saw last night. There are more grapes that need to be picked and I have more to clean up around the farm. We look to be getting rain this weekend which likely cancels my plans to go climbing so I may just go get a load of firewood instead.


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