Very cool tomato supports! I am going to copy them, for sure. :) We had a GORGEOUS weekend here in NC - high 60s. Got SO much done, cleaned up the old veggie bed, perennial beds, and even double-dug a new bed for blueberry plants I will get next month. Incorporated a very large bag of chopped, aged leaves into the bed, then planted irises along the border. Sowed some mesclun, spinach, chives and Chinese leaves in half of the fenced veggie bed. Pulled tons of weeds (Does anyone else really hate winter weeds?) and set out my new bird feeder. The daffodils are in bud, not blooming yet, and the hyacinths are peeking through the mulch. Looking forward to spring color!

Tom, "John, are you using the white bags? I'd be concerned about the dyes and chemicals in the other colors.... " Good point. Heres what they (Greenbag Inc) say... "Is made from non-toxic, non-corrosive materials and safe color-fast dyes". I'm interested in these for several reasons, drainage, cooling and cost. I know they drain well, I don't think you could ever fill one with a garden hose. The upside down tomato bag I tried last spring stayed cool and it was black. The ones from Publix are a buck and I hear W mart's are cheaper. So I'll give it a try. john

Ok, someone take me thru the steps for canning new potatoes that actually tastes good (not mushy) when come out of jars. The problem is you are trying to can NEW potatoes. Doesn't work because the thin, immature skins allow rapid moisture loss, are almost impossible to peel so pathogen levels are high, and they are too high in sugars. You can can them but they will be mushy. Plus the variety makes a big difference. Some varieties hold up to canning much better than others - new or aged. Most canning instructions call for well-aged or mature potatoes as mature/aged potatoes have converted their sugars to starch and the skins have toughened and are easily peeled for canning. If you have too many new potatoes to eat why are you digging them so early.? Just harvest enough to eat and leave the rest to mature. Dave Here is a link that might be useful: NCHFP - Canning Potatoes

Dianne, You're welcome. I have been on a pepper-processing marathon since they have overperformed this year, and it is seemingly impossible to make anything too hot for our darling new daughter-in-law. (Lord knows that if the stuff I've made these last couple of weeks isn't hot enough for her, it won't be because I haven't tried!) Have you ever made Habanero Gold jelly? It is incredibly good and it uses dried apricots as the base flavor, and you spice it up with onion and peppers. The onion and peppers are diced into 1/8" pieces, which is very tedious BUT gives you a beautiful golden jelly with confetti-like pieces of peppers and onions suspended in the jelly like little pieces of confetti. I've made several batches. I started out following the directions exactly, and that batch, which has 1/4 cup of habaneros was a pleasant blend of hot and sweet that even I can eat. So, striving to make it hotter for DH and DDIL, I altered the next batch to double the peppers to 1/2 cup, which can be done safely by decreasing the amount of sweet red bell and red onion by 1/4 cup. That was a lot hotter,but probably not hot enough for them. So, in the most recent batch, I tripled the habs to 3/4s of a cup, and further reduced the sweet red bell/red onion part of the recipe accordingly. The Extra Extra Hot Habanero Gold actually is very, very hot and I am not going to attempt a batch with 1 full cup of habaneros because I don't think anyone could eat it. I had the tiniest taste of the Extra Extra Hot and was sure I had burned a hole in my tongue. I think I have made 5 or 6 batches of Habanero Gold this summer, all because the darned habaneros just wouldn't stop pumping out peppers. Then, 3 of the 4 habanero plants abrupted wilted and died and I took them out, which yielded a huge amount of habs stripped off the dead plants and I've been struggling with this pile of habs all week. Another day or two, and they'll be history. (I still have the equally hot, if not hotter, Red Savina peppers growing though.) It also has been a long salsa summer. I know I have made at least 6 batches of canned salsa, and every single one of them from a different recipe so we'll have a wide variety of flavors from which to choose. I'm still not sure I've reached the ultimate degree of hot salsa that DDIL craves, but I'm getting there. I believe I have at least 3 more batches of hotter salsa left to put up if the peppers and tomatoes cooperate. These will have more habaneros and serranos and maybe some chile tepins as well. My favorite salsa so far this summer has five different kinds of hot pepper that smelled hotter than h-e-double hockey sticks when we had cut up all the raw ingredients and first combined them into the big stockpot. Once it was cooked and blended, though, it didn't taste as hot as it had smelled. It is a great salsa, but it isn't going to burn anyone's taste buds off their tongue. While the onions and potatoes underperformed this summer (that foot of rain in one day in April was very hard on them), the peppers and tomatoes have made up for it, so I've been a pepper-preserving maniac, with hundreds of peppers in the freezer and all kinds of preserved peppers, including bread-and-butter jalapenos, canned jalapeno rings, and bread-and-butter habaneros (mixed with some other peppers to tone down the heat--and the heat is incredibly high). I suspect that I could skip growing peppers next year because I have at least a two year's supply preserved and plants still covered in more peppers, but I'll grow them next year for fresh eating anyway. My son insists that no matter how much salsa is canned and put away in the root cellar (actually, it is a tornado shelter if you want to get picky!), "it won't be enough". I am actually getting tired of peppers and tomatoes and have started making fruit jams and jellies now because we like homemade ones better than those from the store. It has been a great pepper year, so maybe I'll mix some peppers into some of the fruit jellies. I wonder what Strawberry-Jalapeno or Strawberry-Habanero would taste like? I've linked one of the many Hananero Gold threads from the Harvest Forum below. I think both the big batch and the original batch recipes are in the second post on this thread. I've used up all my dried apricots and might try the next batch with either dried pears or dried peaches.\ Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Habanero Gold Thread From Harvest Forum