Harry & David Onion & Pepper relish Wannabe substitute adventures

Sometimes I get in WAY over my head. Here's the story:
Some time back (a few years) Liz came home with a couple of little bottles of Harry and David Onion Pepper relish. I tried some and came to really love it mixed with mayo on quesadillas, or with cream cheese as a dip. It is sour and sweet, and tasty. But it is expensive. So, last weekend I got to rumaging around on the internet and found a recipe for a home-canned version. So I started gathering up the ingredients and equipment. I should have just gone to H&D and bought a case of it - it would have been cheaper. OTOH, I now have all the equipment and know=how so next time will be cheaper (I hope - maybe?)
The recipe calls for a pressure cooker to process the bottles. We used to have one, but got rid of it many years ago - probably when we moved to Texas where nobody home cans. The web forum is rife with tales of people processing it in a Boiling Water Bath, and I happen to have a BWB canner that I use for melting beeswax. The forums are also full of debate about whether you will get botulism trying to can this relish without pressure cooking. Lots have done it and nobody reported having died from it, so I press on.
I went to Sam's on Monday to fix an account problem and got 6 beefsteak tomatoes and 6 red bell peppers as the start to the list of ingredients. When I got home, I noticed that the recipe calls for 6 CUPS of peeled, drained, diced tomatoes. And it occurred to me that if they are supposed to be drained, wouldn't it make more sense to use a not-so-juicy tomato? And there are other ingredients I still needed. So off to Kroger where I bought a bunch of roma tomatoes, jalepeno peppers, huge onions, vinegar, red pepper, and so on.
As I diced and drained, I was putting the stuff into our biggest pot. When I was done, the pot was full and there was absolutely no way I was going to add 8 cups of sugar and 3 cups of vinegar and other stuff to it and have it still in that pot. Liz recommended that I use two pots to cook it in as she fled the scene. Besides, I started dicing all the veges at about 7:00 pm and it took until 9:30. I was ready to start cooking, but the first step in bottling this stuff is to cook everything down for 2 1/2 hours. I decided not to start that at 9:30 pm and went upstairs to watch a movie.
This morning I had a flash of inspiration. My good buddy, Keith, has a pot exactly like mine and I could use his for the other half of the brew. So I went over and borrowed it. While I was there he let me look at the bigger pots he had and there was a pressure cooker. A BIG one. Great! So I borrowed it, too.
Instead of cooking in two pots, I put the mix into the water canner and put it on to simmer. I prepared the bottles, boiled lids, and all that stuff, but it occurred to me that we don't have our bottle gripper nor our canning funnel anymore, either. So I made another trip and got new ones. I got sauce in all the bottles and put them in the pressure canner. Keith's pressure cooker didn't have a wire rack, so I put marbles in the bottom to keep the bottles off the bottom of the pot. I hope it doesn't matter that the bottles can touch each other as they process? And I had to do two layers so I smashed a cheap pie plate more or less flat and put that between the layers. I put it all on the stove and started building up steam. All went well until it was time to put the jiggler on and let the pressure build up. It is supposed to take 3-5 minutes to build up pressure and start jiggling the jiggler. After 20 minutes I decided that the places where steam was coming out really were a problem. But there was some kind of pressure in there because if I jiggled the jiggler by hand, steam came shooting out. So I started my processing timer. 15 minutes later I turned off the heat. Whoo! No explosion. That's a good thing. But I don't know how well it all worked.
One last error. You are supposed to let it cool off slowly. I kind of got busy and let it cool off longer than I thought it would take, so I walked in and took off the jiggler. WoW! There was still steam in there. A LOT of steam! By the time I found the jiggler on the floor and got it put back together the steam was almost all gone. I hope it had pressure long enough to properly process the relish. What do you think?
BTW, the stuff tasted great before it went in the canner! I just opened the canner and took out 10 8 oz. jars and 4 12 oz. jars. None broke, so I guess it is OK that they were touching each other. It was nice to hear seals popping down, but only about half of them so far. One bad thing about not having a wire rack is that the marbles readily let the bottles turn over. Three bottles spent a small amount of time on their sides before I could get them out. Will that ruin the seal? Maybe. There is some vege stuff in the water in the canner and that can't be good. I hope it's all from that one jar that I might have kind of over-filled quite a bit. Well, we will see.