Ive used sealant on decoupaged items. Best I've found is an Acrylic Matte Medium which I thin with water. It is white liquid which dries absolutely clear, no shine, and preserves true color of dried botanicals. It cleans up with water too but once dry is pretty much mosture proof. I've decoupaged wooden trays and kitchen canisters which I can just damp-sponge...I'm not sure I'd actually wash/soak them. The medium can be used as glue too. I use Liquitex brand but any brand would probably be fine. I've used this medium on cards to go thru mail...works fairly well but I really don't send many cards. If I did I'd experiment by sending some to myself to test. I've done a couple of wooden plaques which were fine but mostly now I leave my arrangements unsealed..just use acrylic box frames to protect them temporarily and change often. (Or no cover of any kind...often last beyond the time I tire of them or have new material I want to experiment with...plus I often add a few seedpods or bits of bark, moss, etc. to make it more 3-D than flat). A friend used wax to decorate candles last Xmas..she used some of my pressed Japanese Climbing Fern to coil around the candles and they are lovely. I haven't burned the candles, though...not sure about safety. josh

Tried the grape leaves to, and didn't see any improvement. It may also depend on what kind or grape leaves used. Mine were Concord. I had also done lime soaks and these are just too much extra work to remove the coating of the cukes, and then scour out the stained bowls afterwards. My pepper canning process uses full strength 5% vinegar and a vacuum pump that is applied to a large container of pierced pepproncini, and the brine. This helps to pull out all the air from each pepper and its displaced by the brine. Once its stoops bubbling, the jars get filled with the peppers, and I half fill them with fresh brine and pull another high vacuum again. This causes lots or swelling and bubbles, only becuase the they are getting a little more of the brine inside. After a minute, the anning jar vacuum adapter (Food Saver) is removed, more brine is added and the vacuum is repeated. This is usually done 3 times and then a lid is placed on the jars, and the adaptor is placed over the top. The vacuum is pulled this final time, and once I remove the vacuum hose off the adaptor, a small slug of air will force the lid onto the jar, as well as having a stronger vacuum (stronger than a regular procssing can do). This is a commercial type procedure and needs specialized equipment as mentioned before. The crispest pickles are the refrigerator ones, which see no heat of any kind during canning.

goatlike, i may have the answer why none of your peppers last year were anaheim ! did u plant multiple seeds in your seed starting pellets or pots ? if so, when they germinated did u thin out all but the biggest,strongest and best looking seedling ? i don't know but i bet anaheims may be a slow "bloomer" if u know what i mean. i planted a pack of mixed seed also this year. it contained anaheim,hot wax,serrano,jalapeno and cayenne seeds at a rate of 20% each. put 3 seeds in each peat pellet and as soon as they all germinated i only left the largest. now i have a slew of cayennes and a couple hot wax and maybe 1 or 2 others i cannot yet identify until they pod up. i didn't take into account the different growing characteristics of each plant. the cayenne must be a vigorous plant and it must have been the "winner" in most pots. to get a good mix of all the available varieties one would almost have to grow them all out (individually) to avoid thinning the slow growers. i sure can't tell the difference between pep seedlings when they are an inch tall. this would make an interesting thread at the very end of the growing season to find out what everyone " got " who bought mixed seeds. regards, wildlifeman

Once your HHW peppers start turning orange, they will go to red relatively quickly. They start out more of a green yellow but soon turn to yellow as they grow to mature size. They then will sit in the yellow stage for some time even after reaching mature size. Then you will go out one day and notice a subtle coloring change on a pod or two. And within a day or so, you will notice a definite orange tinge appearing. It will go to a bright orange and then a week or so later will begin its change to a beautiful Red with a slight orange hue. It will stay that way for a good two weeks before you would have to pick it. The actual length in each stage is hard to nail down due to differences in soils, temps, sunlight, nutrients, etc... but they sit in the yellow stage for a long, long time. If you want max heat, you will just have to wait, but they are still quite stout in the yellow stage. Here is a photo of some of my HHW peppers from last year in early August. It shows all the color stages pretty well. Oh, and one other thing I have noticed about HHW peppers is that it seems like the smaller peppers ripen quicker than the larger ones.