tracydr, we have been having a long cool spring so this year we got peas until May. This is unusual, April is more normal for the last of the peas here. Last weekend I harvested the last ones and took out the plants (and dried pods for seed) and the last of the favas. We ate some of the favas and saved some for seed for fall planting. I am growing more peas and favas for next season too! I loved both. I got myself a second fava variety (I was on a trip to southern Europe and got some there) and plan on growing more shelling peas. More work but we loved the fresh sweet flavors, and so versatile! I also plan on growing sugar snaps and snow peas as well, but less snow peas. Last night I harvested the last of the lettuce. It will make two very large salads, they will be the last lettuce based salads of the season. I cannot make myself get them at the grocery store anymore, not the same! Fortunately the cucumbers are here coming to the rescue, and we have already been enjoying them in salads. Last night I also harvested a handful of stupice tomatoes and one Omar lebanese, plus a few sungolds. Lot and lots of carrots too! And a few beets as well. When we returned from the trip we found heaps of artichokes to be harvested (made raviolis, yum!), a whole basket of sungold cherry tomatoes, huge cucumbers, lots of bush valentine green beans and a few runner beans (we pickled the beens). I also harvested all the radicchio (grilled it), and a bunch of kale and other brassicas. A nice surprise was finding pretty large volunteer amaranth, which was also harvested as greens. The trip was nice, but it sure is easier to go and harvest every day or every other day, rather than trying to get all the produce after a three week absence! (I will not even say anything about the weeds..........)

Yes, salt has a LOT to do wit taming down the vinegar power. I use all vinegar and pickling salt for my brines an have that similar taste of almost being sweet when the proper amount of salt is added. Tasting a brine is always very important before you add any kind of cukes or spices. If I wanted a really sour pickle, I would add a bit of alum and ven citric acid as the 5% vinegar today is really too mild for a decent sour pickle. I plan to also experiment with some powdered vinegar and add that to the vinegar brine. The powder is quit strong and is similar to the coating they put on vinegar and sea salt potato chips. After eating a bag of them, my mouth feels like it had been sand blasted!

Yes. THANK YOU!! Its people like you that take that tiny bit of extra effort to actaully find all the 'gems' here, that restore my faith in this forum. To just grab some text from posts, you can also use keyboard commands. Pressing control and the letter 'C' copies text you highlight into a hidden clipboard. Then you can paste the text into a program like Word Pad or other text reader. The PASTE function is done by pressing the control and 'V' key. Highlighting text is easy to do. Place the mouse pointer at the beginning of the intended text, while holding the left mouse button, you move down the text on the page which highlights it what you want to copy. After that, the control C is used to copy, and control V is used to paste elsewhere. My red pepper spread used balsamic vinegar, as well as roasted onions and roasted garlic. All were done on a gas grill with mesquite to add a bit of smokey taste.

Paula, I started getting it around 7 or 8 p.m. last night. DS came over and looked at my computer and messed around with it for a long time and finally decided that my virus protection program was running amok and had decided that it needed to protect me (unnecessarily) from Garden Web. I don't know why. Since it isn't happening anywhere else, I assumed it was A GW problem, and I bet they're working on it. Obviously it is those darned garden gnomes or garden goblins messing with the system again. I've had posts I've made on some threads disappear, too, after I've submitted them and read them and knew they were there. That is so frustrating. Dawn