Vine okra is the loofa gourd either Luffa acutangula or Luffa cylindrica. also called Chinese okra, Climbing okra. Most often Luffa acutangular. Never heard of a vining bell pepper. The plants are called vines but always in bush form, no climbers that I know about.

I have quite a few tomatoes if you want to sase for some. Barbi

Beth, As Glenda and Jay stated, rototilling is not necessary, although it is speedy. To the extent that you need to turn over the soil at all, you can use a good sturdy spade and do it by hand. (It is great exercise and really builds back, shoulder and arm muscles!) You really don't have to rototill at all. In the Ruth Stout No-Work Mulch Gardening Book, I think (it's probably been 15 or 20 years since I read the book) Ruth said she just piled up mulch 12" deep and never rototilled. As the mulch decomposed, it was partially carried down into the soil by rainfall, earthworms, etc. and partly mixed into the soil when she set out transplant using a trowel. There are, in fact, some good reasons not to rototill. One is that every time you turn over the soil, you expose millions of weed seeds to sunlight and all that many of them need to induce germination is a fraction of a second of sunlight. The more you rototill, the more weeds you'll see. Secondly, if you use the same rototiller repeatedly and you always till at the same depth, that can cause a layer of hardpan to form just beneath the tilling depth and that hardpan can impede water drainage and plant root growth. Third, as mulch and other organic matter decomposes, it forms its own structure and gives your soil good texture. (Picture something light and airy like angel food cake with lots of air holes between soil particles.) When you rototill, you destroy that structure and lose a lot of the air holes. You fluff the soil up with the rototiller but then it packs down sort of like flour packs down into a bag/sack or canister. So, you actually have better soil structure with less or no tilling. The lasagna gardening books by Pat Lanza are just a fancier version of Ruth Stout's method and with them no tilling is a part of the philosophy of building lasagna beds. However, if you have bermuda grass you do need to remove it before building a lasagna bed on top of it. There are other options--you could rent a tiller although I hate the thought of the expense of doing that. You could try to barter with someone who has a rototiller--maybe bartering a home-cooked meal or a month's supply of homemade bread or X amount of babysitting hours, etc. in exchange for having someone come over and rototill the garden plot. If your garden plot is fenced-in and you know someone who'd loan you a pig, you could put a pig inside the garden plot and it would turn over that soil in no time at all. Or, if you could trap a couple of armadilloes and turn them loose in your garden, they'd rototill it up for you. OK, that last suggestion wasn't really a serious one. Watch Craigslist and Freecycle sites for people giving away tillers or for people offering to rototill gardens for a small amount of money. You never know. Not having access to a rototiller is not the worst thing in the world, unless you have very dense hard clay that is hard to work with handtools. I can only work our dense clay soil with hand tools when it is moist. When it is dry, trying to dig in it is like trying to dig concrete. I hope you find a solution that works for you. Dawn

Courtney, the canning process IS daunting for newbies! My first and second pressure canners were purchased at garage sales. They were heavy cast aluminum from the 1950's. The first one had slots on the lid that you flipped up screw-down things that were dangling from the sides of the canner. I replaced the pressure gauge and, looking back, it was the most trouble-free canner I ever had, though it was truly ugly and heavy. The second had a rubber gasket and the lid fastened down with about 1/4 of a twist. I had a lot of trouble putting enough muscle on that lid to get it off after the pressure had come down. So I got rid of it and bought a new Mirro pressure canner. It's OK, but nothing to write home about. I have a lot of trouble with liquids siphoning out of the jars. I think it cools down too fast. Jam and pickles are two things that are pretty easy to can. The old way is that you have your jars full of boiling water until right before you put your product into them, which is also boiling hot. I boil water in a small bowl in the microwave and then drop my flats into it so that they are good and hot, as well. After filling the jar, getting out any air bubbles and wiping off the rim, put on the hot flat and screw down the band good and tight. Then carefully tip the jar just ever so slightly, turning the jar till you've done this all the way around, so that the hot contents just touch the edges of the flat. You don't want to cover the flat as this may cause some of the liquid to escape out of the jar, and this will mess up your seal, your counter and maybe you. You can skip the tipping part, if you have any concerns about it, and the jars will usually still seal. It certainly doesn't hurt to BWB jars of jam for 5 minutes, immediately after filling and screwing down the band, and then you are within the new guidelines. But when it comes to pickles, that's another thing. A 5 minute BWB ruins the crispness. Lots of jam and jelly recipes now call for Sure-Gel (pectin), when in truth most fruit has enough natural pectin to make a perfectly good product. Some people say you don't have to cook the jam as long that way and they are always assured of having the right consistency. However, jelly thermometers are not expensive and are a good investment. You can use the 'spoon test' or the 'cold saucer test' instead if you are more experienced. Having to buy Sure-Gel is just an annoyance to me. The only time I use it is when I make banana-pineapple. I use Pomona Pectin for no-sugar or low-sugar jams. I don't really like to pressure can. I do BWB whenever possible. Tomatoes just become mush when pressure canned. I even tried pressure canning some dry beans because someone on one of the other forums said she did it. It was 1 cup of dry beans in a quart jar, cover with water to soak overnight, then drain and fill the jar with boiling water, process for 90 minutes at 10 pounds pressure. I wasn't pleased with having to watch the pressure for 90 minutes, that's for sure. It's convenient having a few quarts of cooked beans on hand, since a quart of beans is about enough for a meal for the three of us (I also make corn bread and fried potatoes) but I discovered there really IS such a thing as cooking beans too long. The consistency is just kind of "gummy". I won't be doing that again. Some say using a pressure canner generates less heat in your kitchen. I don't agree with that, either. With boiling water bath, your processing time is longer, but when you're done, you're done. There's none of this "letting steam escape for ten minutes" at the beginning and there's no waiting for the pressure to build at the beginning and to come down at the end. And with a boiling water bath, once you've got a decent boil going you can actually set the timer and walk off to do something else. With a pressure canner you have to make sure your pressure is staying consistent and with my new canner, it's hard to find the spot that is just right to maintain. So I'm turning the flame up just a smidge, down just a smidge. Of course there are some things you just can't can if you don't have a pressure canner. Green beans is one. I use BWB for applesauce, peaches, pears, and tomatoes. There is also a new rule for tomatoes that says you need to add extra acid for canned tomatoes to be safe. I added a tablespoon of vinegar to each jar the summer of '07 and those tomatoes were so acid I couldn't use them for anything but chili. Maybe it is that some of the new hybrid varieties are not acid enough, but I grow heirloom tomatoes. Sometimes I wonder if all these new canning rules are a way to force home canners to just give up and buy their food already canned. My dear little 80-and 90-year old friends who live on a farm near me have canned every year since they were little girls helping their mother. They still use the old recipes and techniques now that they used in the 50's. They even make their own ketchup and seal it in bottles with a bottle capper. I just don't understand how it is that something that has been safe for years, isn't anymore. And, I might add, when we were kids at home, Mom would seal her jam with paraffin. Often we would pry that paraffin off the top of a new jar of jam and there would be a layer of mold, but Mom would just take a spoon and remove the mold and the top layer of jam and then we'd eat the rest! Yipe, I don't think I could do THAT. Mom always said that there was so much sugar in the jam that it was a natural preservative. But I've never seen that in print. And I never seal my jams with paraffin. But of course anything else that didn't look right was always thrown away. There would be times when a processed jar didn't hold it's seal -- maybe there was a hairline crack in the jar, or something went wrong with the seal -- it happens. Even if the contents looked OK, if there was any 'give' at all at the center of the lid, after the jar had been put on the shelf, it went to the compost. The jar would be examined and if the reason was not apparent, a dab of red nail polish would go on the bottom of the jar. If there was already a dab of red nail polish there, the jar went in the trash, as did any jar that had a nick on the rim. I know of some people that buy new jars every time and I think this is pretty far over the top. I have used the same jars for years and years. In fact some of my jars had belonged to my mother-in-law. I will also use old mayo jars, in a pinch, if the standard screw band still works on them, but not for pressure canning. I HAVE had food poisoning before -- but it was from a purchased frozen pot pie. Whatever methods you use, use what you feel confident with, and have fun with it. Jams and jellies are a great way to start. --Ilene