Hi Debbie - i've emailed the woman about the hostas, and with tax and shipping, it would come to - toooooo much! LOL I told her i would see if one of the local nurseries could bring them in. I was outside for awhile this morning, deadheading and weeding, but the bugs got too bad. Now it's deer flies and ankle flies doing all the biting. You can't win. One thing i need to find out something about is seed-saving. With some plants, the seeds are more obvious, but with something like geraniums, where are those seeds? Somewhere in the little pointy thing that's left after the flower, i guess, but is it a single seed or multiple ones? Dianthus too - i was looking at some this morning and wondering what to do with them. I could see with the saponaria - there are little pods that have formed. I'll have to get out and gather some of those seeds pdq. Some of my lilies have started to bloom, and i'll have to get some pictures of them. Some of the colours are unexpected - like, did i really plant this? I really need to write things down... Yesterday we did some garden tours, and they were pretty interesting. People have some lovely yards! And good ideas. One of the things i liked was a hollow piece of driftwood that had been filled with dirt and pansies were growing in it. I would probably do a different flower, though. And someone had a whole whiskey barrel with holes drilled all through it. It was filled with dirt, a pierced length of PVC pipe down the middle first, and the woman had planted begonias in the holes of the barrel. Are they fibrous, those little ones with the shiny leaves? Can't remember. Anyway, it was cute. Debbie, i'm not sure about the insulation. Do you mean those rigid sheets? I have a feeling we already have them under the current siding - not sure, though. They are on the porch for sure. The guys were on the roof for awhile this morning, but it was just too hot. Fortunately, if the siding needs to be done, the scaffolding will have to be taken down. Good thing! LOL Anyway, i should go and find something constructive to do. No idea what - i've already ripped out the living room carpet so that we'll HAVE to get new flooring, and put up new curtains on the patio door. And cleaned some closets. I suppose i could try to install some closet doors, but that would mean trying to get dh to help and he's out playing at something with his chainsaw or sawmill or something. Oh well, maybe i'll just be lazy! :) Take care - Marcia

The only persimmons we have are the native ones that grow wild here. We have those trees all over our property. I don't pick them until after we've had a hard freeze or two, which generally is November. They are strongly astringent before the first freeze, then they are much better after a freeze or two and even better if they've turned black. I do have to fight the coyotes for every single persimmon from the shorter trees because the coyotes will eat them while they're still green. I think that's why we have so many persimmon trees---the coyotes 'plant' the seeds after eating the fruit. Canned salsa is perfectly safe. Just follow the directions precisely and don't freelance or alter recipes. I made over 140 jars of Annie's Salsa last year and we give them to friends, family members, co-workers and neighbors, and no one has died yet. : ) So far, Annie's Salsa is my favorite of all the kinds I've ever made, and because you do add canned tomato paste to it, it has a texture/thickness much closer to that of commercially canned salsa. The folks who work with my DH love Annie's Salsa so much (we give it as Christmas gifts most years) that they almost cry if their gift bag doesn't have a jar of Annie's Salsa (some years I don't have 100+ jars of each thing I've canned, so they don't all get the same things in their Christmas gift bags). It amazes me that something so simple makes people so happy. Habanero Gold jelly is another great success story from the Harvest Forum. Frozen salsa can thin out a little when you thaw it because of the water content in the tomatoes. You can 'fix' it by stirring in a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste after you thaw it. You can sometimes prevent it by chopping up your tomatoes to make salsa for the freezer and then letting them sit in a colander or strainer over the sink for a couple of hours while all the excess moisture drains out. Most paste tomatoes are so thick and meaty that they don't give you watery salsa, but regular slicing tomatoes will because of their higher water content. For crisper pickles, use only pickling varieties of pickles, pick them younger and smaller, and pickle them as soon as you pick them--not a day or two later. Be sure you're cutting the ends off the cukes and discarding them. You also might want to try some of the recipes that call for the use of "pickle crisp" or for brining or fermenting. I freeze tomatoes all the time. I just put whole tomatoes in the freezer in ziplock bags, and then either use them for canning or cooking, but don't eat them raw half-thawed or fully thawed because I don't like the texture. For cooking, they taste perfectly fine. Most years I freeze gallons and gallons of bite-sized tomatoes after I've dehydrated them and we eat them for months and months. This year I haven't frozen much and haven't canned or dehydrated anything. Fires have kept me busy, so we've just given away all the extra tomatoes and peppers and stuff. I know I'll regret that this winter, but it is a priority to keep our firefighters well-fed and well-hydrated, so gardening/food preservation has taken a back seat to the work with the volunteer fire departments. I don't pickle okra, so cannot comment on it. Did you follow an approved recipe for pickled okra? If you did, I cannot imagine what went wrong. If your frozen okra turned black and slimey, I'm guessing you didn't blanch it first. If you don't blanch it, then the enzymes that cause ripening continue to be active and it can turn all slimey and black. I'd can salsa or any other tomato product with no fear whatsoever as long as I was using a safety-approved recipe. They all have enough vinegar, lime juice or lemon juice to give them the right (as in safe) pH. For Annie's Salsa, we liked it fine when made with vinegar, but then when I followed the safety-approved suggestion to substitute bottled lemon juice (bottled, not fresh-squeezed, because the bottled has a stable, tested, uniform pH level) and/or bottled lime juice, we liked the Annie's Salsa even more. We've canned hundreds of jars of Annie's Salsa during the last 5 or 6 years and haven't had a single jar go bad or a single person get sick from eating it. It is wise to be concerned about botulism, but with salsa properly canned, it isn't going to happen. I do hear a lot more about botulism with green beans or listeria with pickles, but that's because proper canning procedures weren't followed. For example, people will freelance and add some other vegetable to the green beans, which is a no-no, or they'll add oil or meat, also a no-no. Or, they'll use a boiling water bath canner for the beans, instead of a pressure canner, which is not safe. Lots of people make refrigerator pickles without canning them and that's where the listeria problem develops. Some old refrigerator pickle recipes that used to be considered safe have been found via modern-day testing to no longer be considered safe. So, as long as you're using current, tested, safety-approved methods, and not out-of-date, obsolete ones, you do not have to worry. It is good to be concerned about safe procedures, but not good to be paranoid. Canning isn't fun if you make yourself crazy with worry. : ) I freeze all my excess green beans. It is so much faster than canning and we like frozen better than canned. It probably depends on what you grew up with. I grew up on frozen green beans from the garden, so that's what I like. Some people grew up eating canned green beans, so that's what they like. Please don't be afraid of salsa. It is one of the simplest things to can. I believe salsa was the very first thing I canned on my own after I grew up and left home (used to make salsa with my dad when I was a kid) and I haven't had a single batch fail yet. The only thing I think is easier and more worryfree than salsa is jelly. Anyone can make jelly. I feel the same way about salsa though. With a safety-approved recipe that is followed exactly, anyone can make salsa. Even a caveman can do it.

Welcome, Dee, Becky and Lisa, glad you could join us! I spent the day dealing with my groundhog problem. He has cleared my back flower bed, and the hole he is digging is going to undermine my shed. Time for solutions! I called Animal Control and they gave me a list of people who will come to your home and trap the critter. Great. I called the first one and he wanted to charge me $100 to trap my groundhog. I'm serious. AND, I guess as an added bonus, he said they would also take it away. NO?! Really!? And I was thinking the critter would live in that trap in my backyard forever. Sorry for the sarcasm, but come on. In any event, a friend of a friend is, hopefully, coming over sometime this week to trap the groundhog AND take him away, free of charge. This guy has already trapped 13, yes, 13 groundhogs at his home/yard this year. This wasn't the most encouraging news I've had recently. Hey, on a more postive note: The first swap for FOTESS will be posted Saturday! Are ya ready!!? Shirley!

OK, having said not to be paranoid about bacteria, I have to add a caution. I know a little bit about apple trees, having lived with one outside my house for a few years (they were Cortlands) and also at one time in my life I was in charge of a fall festival at a nature center and we had a cider press and made cider. Plus I grew up in Michigan's apple country. I routinely made applesauce out of organic apple "drops" and it was no easy task because the apples were just full of brown spots and discolorations inside and out. Now these were old apple trees that got no husbandry whatsoever. But yes, good sauce in the end. But I actually washed, peeled, cored and cut them up individually, so I had a lot of control over the apple bits that got into the sauce. But as I mentioned, I'm more of a "boutique" canner than a "git 'er done" canner. I also got to go to an orchard that donated apples for our cider pressing demo, and we were allowed to pick up the drops. We did not give out many samples of the cider though, we bought cider for samples. There is a problem with dropped apples, and that is due to contact with the ground there is a risk that they will be contaminated with E. coli. (Short for Escherichia coli, the species name). Not necessarily the deadly super-bug strain of E. coli found in meat, but the kind that can make you real sick like from contaminated water. There have been cases of people getting sick from unpasteurized apple cider, there was a case in my hometown from a local orchard. The problem with the drops is that on the ground they can come into contact with animal feces, and if you have deer and raccoons and other animals foraging on those apples, you can bet that is possible. Now here's the part where others may want to chime in, because I know that acid and sugar in applesauce takes care of botulism, but I don't know about E. coli. I know that boiling for a certain time will kill the bacteria, I just don't know how the thickness variable plays out in applesauce as far as the boiling, because thickness will affect heat penetration. Since there are no specific cautions that I have found on these Cooperative Extension Web sites about applesauce and dropped apples, I would hazard a guess it is OK. It's not like you get some kind of guarantee that the apples you buy commercially have never touched the ground! I just know drops are not preferred for selling commercially, either as raw apples or for making cider. However, the longer the apples sit on the ground the more likely they are to get some kind of contamination. Maybe a good boiling will take care of that. I would call my Cooperative Extension Agency just to make sure, or maybe someone else can chime in here who has used drops. I peel and cut my apples because I can't afford organic ones and I know too much about what is on the peels to want it coming in contact much with my applesauce. Like I said, the method you are planning on using is fine, I just like chunkier, more "boutique" style applesauce since I give it away as gifts. I have not heard of any cases of E. coli contamination in applesauce, so maybe I am just being overly fussy. I would use them myself, but just not with the method you suggest. But maybe others here have done so with no problems. Whatever the risk I think it is low, and it may be non-existent, so I would like to hear what others have to say.