You know Tansy, your comment about hardening off your tomatoes and peppers in WS containers gave me an idea. Last year, my WS peppers were so late to germinate that they didn't have time to produce ripe fruit before the first killing frost. I went ahead and WS'd some of the tomatoes this week, but the peppers really seem to need warmer soil to germinate. So I think I will sow them in WSing containers, but keep them inside until they germinate, then put them outside, before they have a chance to die from damping off. I think it will give them a little edge over the ones I WS'd last year. I may even do some of the longer DTM tomatoes that way too. What do you think? Trying to get a harvest in a short growing season, Bonnie

I assumed so, the ones that I had seen before just seemed a bit more tapered or wasn't as pimpled I guess? Maybe I just have some ugly pods hah!

Bon, You can use peppers so many ways, so take advantage of having huge loads of them to experiment with different ways to use them and to preserve them. Before I made pepper jelly for the first time back in the 1990s, for example, I never would have thought I'd like pepper jelly. Now I make tons of it almost every year. It is the same with candied jalapenos. I can a lot of them each year and we give away a lot as gifts at Christmas. People love them. Who knew that would happen? I have a nephew who has digestive problems and he no longer can eat regular jalapenos, but the candied ones don't bother is stomach, so I try to give him a case of candied jalapenos every Christmas. I'm about to have a major canning problem. Tim starts a new job in a new division within the same police agency in two weeks. He'll be leaving the division where he's worked for the last 8 or 10 years, and where a couple hundred people get gift bags of home-canned goods from us every Christmas. It is a well-established tradition we all enjoy---around October the guys at work start trying to trick him into telling them exactly what I canned back in the summer and fall and exactly what will be in the gift bags. He and I prefer to keep it secret----it is the same stuff more or less every year, but one year it might be Jalapeno Jelly and the next year it might be Habanero Gold...or it might be Zesty Bread and Butter Pickles one year and Candied Jalapenos the next. It's almost always Annie's Salsa, unless I've given away too much or canned too little, and then the folks who don't get the salsa are a little disappointed. I think the annual guessing game is a hoot, and it certainly shows how eagerly they await the annual distribution of canned goods from our garden. It does wear me out sometimes, though. Tim will have a lot of officers working for him/with him in the new division, and he is crazy if he thinks I am going to do enough canning for him to take Christmas gifts to everyone in two divisions. So.....while I enjoy sharing our canned salsa, jellies, jams and peppers with everyone in whatever division he is working in, I am not even (no way, no how) going to double my workload by trying to put together gift bags for two divisions. I think he is in trouble. The folks he's leaving are going to miss their Annie's Salsa, Habanero Gold, Apple Pie Jam and Candied Jalapenos, but I'm not crazy enough to think I can put together 300 bags of canned goodies versus the current 150-200. I think his new work group will be smaller, so I might even be able to cut back on how many tomatoes and peppers I grow and can in future years, once I have a better understanding of how many people are in his soon-to-be new division. I enjoy canning and I enjoy sharing the goodies from our garden, but this whole Christmas thing at work has sort of taken on a life of its own that I cannot escape. I have to have certain "canning quotas" in my mind when planning the garden, planting it, harvesting it and doing all the canning, or I end up running out of certain items (especially Annie's Salsa) at Christmas time. Now, I just hijacked your pepper thread and I apologize, but while talking about all the ways to preserve peppers, I started thinking about this job change of his and how it will affect my gardening and canning. Because peppers are so prolific, though, they do make great gifts at the holidays---whether you're giving away pepper jelly, salsa, candied jalapenos, pepper flakes in little spice jars or whatever. That's a little more food for thought for you. You also can make pepper jelly or candied peppers and barter them for things with people who don't grow peppers or who don't can them. The possibilities are endless. I have friends to whom I give salsa and Habanero Gold every year, and they give me fresh peaches and apples in the years when they have a plentiful harvests. (They give me tons and tons of them!) I always can and freeze the peaches and apples, and am careful to give back to my friends some of their own apples and peaches made into jams and jellies. It is sort of an endless circle of giving. You can do the same thing with peppers! Dawn

mine never grew that big/long, nor were they prolific. I figure it was because it was a poor pepper year in general, so am giving them another shot. did NOT get the seed from FM, but got it from another source …