Canning and my not so many garden tips

I've never really done much canning. I've canned applesauce before but ALWAYS with my mom (so she basically ends up doing most of it), but I had so many tomatoes in my garden I decided I was going to do something with them. Salsa or spaghetti sauce? If I were to do salsa I'd still have buy a bunch of stuff from the store, more peppers, cilantro, garlic etc. Also, my sister's mother in law cans the yummiest spaghetti sauce so I decided to go with that and got her recipe. I was a tiny bit nervous since I've never done it by myself, but it ended up being super simple! I tripled the recipe and got about 14 quarts. I started at like 5 pm while I was making dinner and cutting food anyway. I used everything out of the garden (tomatoes, a couple of green peppers, one jalapeno, basil, and some parsley) except onions, which I had to buy. The other seasonings I used were dried, and you don't put oil in canned sauce so it ended up being fat free. All I did was throw everything in the blend tech and pulse for a few seconds. It took a couple of blender batches, but then I just put it in a big pot and let it cook down for about 3-4 hrs. So I finished dinner, cleaned up, (all the while stirring the big pot here and there) put the kids to bed and then filled the jars. They processed in a pressure caner (which I borrowed from my neighbor) for like 25 min. Hooray, I'm adding to my food storage! It made me happy to know that if I HAD to survive without going to the store I could not only eat tomatoes out the garden but spaghetti too:)

So a couple of you asked about my gardening secrets...I actually don't have any! My garden boxes were already in our back yard when we moved in. They are like 4'x4' and they are built up a bit, probably like 2 feet. I like how they are raised, it's better on your back for weeding and picking and also I think there are less bugs since they're a couple of feet off the grass? I mix in new soil every year before I plant, nothing fancy, just regular garden soil. This year I planted lettuce, beans, and parsley from seed. Tomatoes, squash, peppers, basil, I bought little plants.

My mom taught me a trick with planting tomatoes that has really made my tomatoes plants get huge and produce a ton...you plant about a third of the plant in the ground, not just the roots, and you lay it sideways. So you kind of make a little trench, lay the plant horizontally in the trench and cover with dirt. You kind of have to bend it carefully to make the top coming out of the ground vertical. This way the plant gets a really great root system and can grow huge!

I fertilize right when I plant with miracle grow and then use miracle grow like one more time a couple of weeks later. I also use this fertilizer, which I think has really helped my plants to grow nicely. I think I only used it once this past summer. And those are basically all the garden tips I have. :)