Pickling salt is a finer grain compared to Kosher. If your following a recipe and its stating an exact measure of pickling salt, and you use Kosher, the amount will not be the same. Pickling salt also dissolves quicker. If you can tomatoes as a sauce or juice, there is a better way with a lot less labor and time. The use of a Roma food strainer will work very well. The tomatoes need absolutely no prepping, peeling or anything else, unless the are to big for the hopper, then you cut them. When I canned tomatoes from 200 plants, it would a have taken days to get them all peeled and mashed. Usually I like thick sauces, as I cut the tomatoes open, dig out most of the liquid and seeds, and run through Roma (Villaware), and the skins and seeds are passed out the end as waste. The sauce is quite thick and doesn't need as much cooking down to get it thick. Instead of lemon juice, I use citric acid. I just don't want a lemon taste in my tomatoes, no matter how small it might be. Also, I add the citric and salt to the empty jars just before they are being filled. In this way, your sure that the acid level is exact as well as salt. Cooking the tomatoes down with the salt and acid at the begining, can increase the acidity and saltiness. For apple sauce or other apple recipes, I like adding an acid blend of citic, malic and tarteric. This can help safety if the apples are overripe or low in acid. Additionally, ascorbic acid should be used with apples as it helps retain color.

I tried the garlic water on my tomatoes and it worked well to stop the beetles from eating holes in my leaves, I added one drop of dish soap to my water per gallon. It does smell after a while so make sure to keep it outside if you mix it and don't use it all at once. I sprayed mine on the leaves being careful to not spray on the flowers, once in the evening after all the bees and other good insects were done with the flowers. I didn't water the plant with the solution, not sure about that. Good Luck

Bacteria are ubiquitous, and most of them are simply harmless cohabitants, or even beneficial partners, in our existence. Even many e-coli bacteria are merely troublesome. A few, however, are truly nasty. But even though e-coli can be deadly there are other coliform bacteria that are "just there". Finding bacteria in a well is often insignificant, as any amount of ground level dirt that sneaks into a well will almost certainly carry coliform with it. Health departments routinely differentiate between e-coli and other coliform bacteria in their testing because the difference matters. It's almost impossible to drill a well without carrying a little bit of topsoil into the well itself. After drilling the well is sealed with bentonite (that is, bags of dry clay are poured around the well casing below the topsoil level, below the level of bacterial activity, which prevents seepage from ground level.) Shocking the well will kill any bacteria that found their way into it. Rechecking will determine whether it's a recurrent problem. Personally, I'd be more concerned with waste from industrial pollution- we had a dry cleaner here who was dumping carcinogens into a floor drain, and that made quite a plume in the acquifer for a time. It pays to have an agressive municipal attitude towards water quality when people are willing to cheat ... and there's unknown, but very significant, amounts, of heavy metal contamination in different parts of the state due to years of mining. Seems like half of Montana is an EPA superfund site anymore. Good luck, Mark

We love this range, the burners have plenty of power. 2qts of water will boil on the high-powered corner burner in about 5 minutes, even faster in a big pot on the center burner. The center burner has plenty of power for authentic stir-frying with a residential-sized wok. The oven is fantastic and the even heat has really upped our baking game. (Note that the unit I bought also had gas orifices for each burner that that were sized for propane; these orifices are much smaller than those for natural gas and I had to drill them out to achieve the approximately equivalent BTU rating for natural gas as stock natural gas orifices were not available for any source I could find. Drilling all 5 orifices required getting consulting a chart to determine the right size drill bits but only took 15 minutes.) A couple of issues we have found: there is some coupling between the air supply for the top burners and the oven, which has a very tight seal; we have found that closing the oven door abruptly when there are many burners in use can cause the smaller burners to go out. However, the auto-relighting system immediately kicks in and the spark generator will cause them to fire up again. Another issue is that the top burner grates have been designed with a pattern that is very stylish but fails to support smaller saucepans at more than the 4 closest points, so a small saucepan or frying pan has to be centered carefully or it may tip over without the outer 4 points of the grating to support it.