Small batch canned tomatoes.

My garden this year is producing a decent number of tomatoes. Not so beautiful, but I would like to save them. Every year we use a lot of cans of tomatoes for pasta sauces. I thought it would be nice if I could can my tomatoes and hopefully save money throughout the winter.

I used a recipe from Simple Bites. It was easy to follow, although for my first batch of tomatoes I made the a couple mistakes.
First I always get quarts and pint jars mixed up since here in Japan everything is labeled nicely with ml. So I added too much lemon juice.
Second I added the lemon juice on top of the tomatoes, which is what the recipe recommends. However this goes against the USDA guidelines for canning tomatoes which call for the lemon juice to be added to the jar first.
Third, as you can see from the picture below, I put the top on too tightly on one of my jars, and the bottom exploded.

I was glad it was a half pint that exploded rather than my pints.

There was a fair amount of liquid lost from a few of the jars, but after doing a bit of research online this seems to be fine.

Update: Since I wrote this post I put up another 5 pints, without my previous mistakes.