Hi dubai-gardener, I am still what I would consider a rather newbie gardener and this will be my 4th season trying to grow vegetables. My first season I successfully grew tomatoes. They weren't tasty varieties unfortunately. The second season I planted well over 200 tomato seeds of many varieties (seed bought from the US) and they all kept dying. By the time I got only one to successfully grow, the temperatures were too high for the flowers to turn into fruit. Last year I finally successfully grew beautiful and tasty Brandywine Sudduth tomatoes. I only had 3 plants though, and one got some kind of disease. But they were the best tomatoes I have ever had. I was able to also get about 5 cucumbers out of 4 plants (huge aphid problem) and also grew a couple of spaghetti squash though I stored them too long thinking they can last like normal winter squash and they went bad before I tasted one :( the 2nd season I was late but got zucchini, eggplant, and buttercup squash to grow but the heat did not let them produce :( I wasn't going to garden this year but I am about to plant some pepper and eggplant varieties tonight :) I regret not planting tomato seeds earlier though... I will definitely try to grow them next year though! Oh, and I tried yellow, white, purple, and red carrots but 2 years in a row I got nice foliage but the largest carrot only grew to about 3" so I give up trying again for now. The beets I only got seedlings and nothing much more. Not sure what went wrong with those. Where do you buy your cow manure from? I would love to do bokashi once we move into a home where we have plenty of garden space to bury the food. I have been researching it and the next time I travel to the US I am going to buy a biiiig ol' bag of the bokashi ingredients to make my own bokashi granules. That stuff is expensive here! I will eventually buy the bokashi buckets from here though. But I think a house with a yard is still about a year away :( I have seen cute lil' bees all years I grew veggies but they never pollinated my squash plants for me. I had to do all that by hand. They loooooooved these one flowers we have... they swarmed the yellow colored ones (didn't touch the same variety in red) If you want a pic of the flowers I can take one for you so you can try to encourage bees into your garden :) I have had ladybugs visit my rooftop garden two years in a row but they arrived a bit late for my cucumber plants. They laid eggs and their larvae did eat up most of the aphids.... I just wish they showed up earlier :( That disappoints me that Shalimar is not really filling their bags to 50litres! Next time I have to buy soil I will measure it myself and if it is indeed less I will have to speak with the owner about this!

I've seen similar tomato-fruit salsas offered at many stores, including Costco, which sells a very good tomato-mango-peach. I have two thoughts, for what it's worth. Without getting into the acidity issue, my first thought is that for my taste, at least, even at the original 1/8 cup level, it's too much salt. That's a teaspoon of salt per pint, which is pretty high, especially allowing for any additional salt that might be in the commercial tomato sauce. (I know that varies by brand.) A salsa with fruit in it is going to be more delicate and I think the salt can overwhelm the fruitiness pretty easily. I think the best option for over-salting, assuming the mixture isn't already canned, is to make another salt-free batch and combine them. The yield isn't that great per batch and if you really like this combination, 12 pints isn't too much to have around. That's one per month. It would take a whole lot of pineapple to reduce the saltiness of the original batch. At some point your salsa would lose the character that appeals to you. Secondly, I'm not sure you caught Annie's comment (There have been so many threads on her salsa over time.) that the pressure canning method with less vinegar/citrus juice is no longer recommended. The Extension service she consulted was comfortable with the boiling water recipe at the higher level of vinegar but couldn't commit to the pressure canned version. I don't know that it's unsafe, just that it's not approved, so I thought I'd share a heads-up on that one. Good luck with your salsa, whatever you decide to do. Carol

It might be because they are cooked on the boat when they are caught...I don't know if they use sea water for that. When I used to go shrimping with my husband, he would boil shrimp on the boat for us to eat, using the water out of the bay. Yuck. I wouldn't eat them. However, I do eat crab legs, every chance I get. To me, the bodies taste particularly salty...more so than the legs.

Okay, so it sounds like you aren't so much worried about the germination itself, but your short growing season, or at least "short" in terms of appropriate tomato-growing weather. So you think you'll do better buying plants that have been started early and grown in greenhouses and which are further along to begin with at planting out time, right? Seems like a valid concern. Again, I think if I were you, I'd sow some tomato seeds, and buy plants. Experiment, but cover your bases, lol. Plant out your winter-sown plants and see how they do, and have your purchased, further-along plants going too, because in all honesty, God forbid any of us is without homegrown tomatoes! I completely understand your concern on that point! :) As I said, my zone is very different, but we do deal with cold springs here, and don't usually plant out tomato seedlings till mid-June or so. And again, my winter-sown tomatoes catch up suprisingly quickly to greenhouse-grown seedlings (I am always surprised by that - don't know why I am, since it happens every spring!) One thing I do when I plant mine out is to use the tops of clear, plastic, 2-liter soda bottles, like little cloches, over each tomato seedling, to give it a bit of protection and added heat. Some people use row cover for added heat, or even low tunnels. Can you do something like that to promote growth?