You know, I'd just feed the eggs back to the animals or toss them if you are concerned about it. Break the eggs one at a time into a dish to check for funny smells, etc. first though. :) You ought to see some of the wierd places MY hens lay away in--! An empty trash can, the BBQ, the rabbit hutch, in a planter filled with gravel and my personal favorite, suspended IN a sage bush! We were foolishly looking UNDER the bush for eggs... Hens LOVE to feel that they are hiding their nests, especially banties. Clever little snots. Right now they have a sneaky spot on the concrete patio, between a plastic storage tub and a folding plastic table, for cri-yi. Your girls might be getting the urge to go broody (rooster or no). You can partially solve the 'laying away' problem by making the nest boxes the most attractive place to lay eggs. Hens love dark hidey-hole type nests. I use wooden nest boxes that are enclosed except for the front. I tacked up some black woven plastic groundcloth over the front like a curtain, with a slit cut up the middle of the front of the box opening. Add lots of straw for nest material. The hens love it! :) Good luck with the egg hunt! Velvet ~:>

Welcome Charlene! Your garden sounds so nice. And your pickles are fine, but I'll go point-by-point to make sure I hit all the important stuff. "-We ran them through the dishwasher" Good, you need clean jars, and they are less likely to break if they are hot when you pour in the brine. "-We brought to a low boil simmer:" Fine. You can also find brines that have some water to make the pickles less tart, but you want to use a tested recipe that is at least 50% vinegar. I would skip the alum. It's a form of aluminum, which is not great to ingest. Next time you can use Pickle Crisp, which is calcium chloride powder to add to each jar; it's sold at Walmart near the canning jars. But alum would not stop me from eating this batch of pickles. "we did not use tongs or anything just used our hands." I always pack jars with clean hands. "BUT we ran out of the vinegar solution" As long as the recipe didn't say to boil the brine for x minutes before using, you are fine. You did right using the same ingredients. The only danger in waiting to fill the last two jars is if they get cold, the hot brine may cause thermal shock & break the jars, which obviously didn't happen. "-We put the cap w/rubber seal and screwed the tops on tight from the dishwasher" This is ok for fridge pickles. When you can in a boiling water bath, you will want to put the tops on "fingertip tight," in other words using your fingertips & turning just until you meet resistance. This leaves room for the air to expand out of the jar, which creates a vacuum seal upon cooling. "-Let them sit out for two hours to room temperature" This is ok too. Normally you want to get food cold asap to avoid bacterial growth, but for pickles it's probably not a huge deal. If you do put them straight in the fridge, you should go for rack-bottom shelf, not a flat glass shelf which will speed heat transfer from the bottom & possibly cause breakage (brine in the fridge is a nightmare, I can tell you that from personal experience). You are right that fridge pickle jars do not seal. They will be crisper than pickles that have been heated in a boiling water bath. So, the things I would change for next time are the alum and the time between filling & refrigerating. Also, I prefer to use a tested recipe from the Ball Blue Book, from the USDA, or from a forum member who gives the recipe's credentials. About the two months...I sometimes keep things way longer than I'm supposed to. Pickles are one of the safest products to can as long as you use enough vinegar, which you did. Personally I wouldn't choose to give them away after the "expiration date," but I would keep eating them until they were finished, or until they showed signs of spoilage like unusually soft or slimy pickles, mold floating in jars, bad smell. Open kettle canning is when you start out like you did, but then you put the jars on the shelf instead of in the fridge. It is no longer recommended by the USDA for any products. There are people who still do it, but I think it's best not to do it unless a person has a lot of experience and can really predict how that will affect the food (e.g., for jam, you will notice if it gets moldy, but other foods may be more sneaky about spoiling). A few other notes about pickles: as long as you have 50% vinegar, you can add whatever spices you like (but adding 1/4 cup of dill might count as another vegetable instead of a spice!). Other vegetables may need more vinegar, e.g. garlic must be pickled in 100% vinegar. Some recipes can be processed for longer times at 180F to try to make them less soft than boiling (known as low-temperature pasteurization), but make sure the recipe is approved for this method. Here is a link to a discussion of pickles that has a few different recipes and a discussion of fridge pickles. Enjoy your pickles and the time with your son! Melissa

> I don't imagine things are different in Canada, Zabby. Actually, there are some significant differences, which is why there's work for me on accounting texts here, most of which are adaptations of U.S. books. But the overriding principles we're arguing about are universal. > In the U.S. there are 7 sets of GAAPs. I don't know any accountants who talks of "sets of GAAPs" --- they're not like the ten commandments, but a large body of principles and customs. > However, "So the overall cost of my life doesn't go up if I start using that shovel to grow veggies." doesn't ring true in this case. We are not measuring the total cost of your life. We are trying to make a comparison between the costs of a home-canned jar of something with what it costs to buy that something. So, in this case, you have to include all those bits and pieces in order to compare like to like. Ah, but here is where I think your logic is truly faulty. As I said, accounting is a decision-making tool. It helps businesses make decisions about their finances, governments make decisions about how much tax to charge you, and people make decisions about what to do with their money, time, etc. (though of course it's not the only or even the most important factor in those decisions, as we have all agreed in the case of canning and gardening). So accounting helps you ask various questions and get answers that compare things. Now, you seem to be asking the question "How much does it cost a company, starting from building the factory, to make and sell a can of tomatoes, vs. how much it costs a person, starting with absolutely nothing, to make a can of tomatoes?" As an academic exercise, it may be interesting, but it's irrelevant to most real situations. The question I was talking about is the useful one: what is the overall extra cost (or savings) to my life is I can veggies instead of buying them? If I already own a shovel to grow my flowers with, that shovel has been already "paid for" out of my "growing flowers as a hobby" cost centre in my life. If I "charge" some of it to my canning cost centre, then I'm double expensing it --- a no-no according to GAAP in any country. > There's also another aspect we haven't begun to look at: Cost of possession. When you are buying things you generally buy for immediate needs, or maintain a very small inventory. Not necessarily. I know plenty of people who buy canned goods by the caseload from Costco or Price Club. But the general point is true that there is a cost of maintaining inventory --- though it can't be generalized to a particular percentage for most situations. It depends a great deal on how the inventory is managed and where it's kept. (That cost is much higher, for e.g., in places where space is expensive, or for goods that require special circumstances --- so the cost of possession was way higher for things I stored frozen in the city than for a canned good in my larger small-town home.) A much bigger often-uncounted cost by many people is the land --- I would have bought a home with a smaller yard if I hadn't known I wanted a veggie garden. So part of my mortgage every month should reasonably be costed to my veggies. On the other hand, the veggies I grew in Toronto were in my BF's backyard which he wasn't using anyway, so it would have been UNreasonable to apply the space cost there. It's comparable to, say, vacant land that a municipality donates to a company to help entice them to move to that municipality. SImilarly, one's labour time should be charged only if, realistically, one would have been making money if one wasn't canning. (In my case this is sometimes true.) If one does it for sheer joy, then it's comparable to volunteer labour. > The fact is, most opportunity costs are unrealistic. Sure, if you weren't canning you could spend that time on a ski trip. But would your _really_ make that trip? Probably not. Opportunity costs are hard to measure, because who can say for sure what one WOULD have done? But they are absolutely real, and companies that ignore them in their accounting make worse decisions. In the case of many people who regard canning as a hobby, if they weren't canning, tney'd be doing something else recreational, very possibly something that costs money. > Number one: You cannot can food less expensively than you can buy it. Well, the main difference between us probably really is that I think you're using a definition of "less expensively" that is irrelevant to the question most people trying to make this calculation are actually asking --- and I mean quite apart from including the whole "priceless experience" factor. One that I suspect would, in fact, be rejected by an auditor. Even under my definitions, mind you, I think many people, probably including me, don't save money by canning. But I think some people do. Sigh. I am tired of arguing this one, too, GL, and I don't actually have any expectation you will change your mind; the only reason I am bothering, is that actual cost, in a realistic, practical sense, DOES enter into it for some folks. (I have one friend, for example, who canned fruit during grad school to save money.) And for those people who might want or really need to economize in this way, it's not helpful to say categorically it can't be done, nor to claim that some supposed "rule" of accounting means they "have" to count certain things as costs that don't make sense in the real situation. It shows a misunderstanding (all too common) of what accounting actually means. > Number two: Who cares? We can for all sorts of great reasons, and actual cost hardly enters into it. For me it sure doesn't, I am 100% with you on that! And we do agree on the main thing that the experience and great product are the most important, for us. Z

Eggs will age faster at the warmer temp in the frig door. Because eggs will keep for several weeks, if you're going to use them in a short period of time the door storage is fine. Guess that still doesn't solve your dilemma about no storage room in the door. Not sure what you mean though: are you concerned that there is no holder shaped specifically for the eggs (out of the carton) in the door? Or that you can't fit a carton in the door? We have a top-freezer frig and there is room for a carton in the door (old frig, though). Best to store eggs in their original carton for freshness, anyway.