There are many ways to store produce. Each type of veggie or fruit has specific storage requirements, and many of them can be stored in different ways. You have to tailor your storage method to the specific fruit or vegetable's needs as well as how you like to eat the foods. Some veggies or fruit can be stored 'fresh' for a relatively long time, while others have a relatively short storage period in the fresh stage. Stone fruit (fruit with pits like cherries, peaches, apricot and plums) and berries have a relatively short shelf life as fresh fruit, but they can be preserved using multiple methods. For example, with peaches you can preserve them by freezing them, canning them as peach halves or slices, pickling them, dehydrating them, or by turning them into jam, jelly, syrup, pie filling, conserve, marmalade or fruit butters (plain or spiced). You can use peaches in some fruit salsa recipes. That gives you a lot of options for the peaches you cannot eat fresh. In a good fruit year, a tree will give you more fruit than you possibly could eat fresh and in a timely manner. While stone fruits don't store well in a root cellar, or at least only for a pretty brief time, apples can be stored for months if your root cellar is cool enough. We use a combination of canning, freezing, dehydrating, fermentation and root cellaring, so I'll briefly mention each one. ROOT CELLARING: There are entire books on this subject and you don't have to actually have a root cellar to use root cellaring techniques. Some people use in-ground tornado shelters as root cellars, other use home basements, and others dig storage pits in the ground. As long as you can provide the appropriate air temperature and relative humidity, you can root cellar quite a few veggies, including potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, winter squash and pumpkins, and miscellaneous root crops like carrots, parsnips and turnips. Some of these can be stored on open shelves and others can be stored in containers of sand. Even without any sort of a cellar, many of them can be keep indoors in a cool, dry location where the humidity stays fairly constant. I often keep sweet potatoes in plastic trays in an extra bedroom. The foods our family most commonly store this way are onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, and sometimes carrots or cabbage. Winter squash, in particular, can be stored up to about a year in a cellar type situation. FREEZING: This works best if you don't have to worry after frequent power outages like the ones often caused by freezing rain or sleet. I am far enough south that we rarely have power outages, so I use freezing as one of my primary storage methods. I have 3 freezers. During the height of the canning/storage season, all 3 will fill up. Then, throughout the year as we empty them out, I consolidate the remaining produce to one freezer and unplug the other two. Right now we are down to 1 and 1/2 freezer full of food. By May, we'll probably be down to one freezer, but then the harvest will start rolling in and I'll start filling up freezers again. With freezing, it is important to use the appropriate methods, of which blanching is one, to ensure food quality. Every year when we harvest onions, I set aside enough to last us about 6 months for fresh eating, then chop or slice the remainder. I put them in 1/2 C. quantities in plastic ziplock bags and put the smaller bags in larger 1 or 2 gallon bags. They are great to use in any recipe you'll be cooking and do not, therefore, require crisp onions. I store the onions for fresh eating in netting tubes in my tornado shelter. The foods we usually store this way include broccoli, carrots, corn, some of the onions, sugar snap peas, green peas, green snap beans, okra, southern peas (zipper, cream, purplehull pinkeyes, blackeyes, etc.), corn, spinach, some cabbage (in the form of freezer slaw), some melons (you can make melon balls and freeze them, then thaw them and eat them half-thawed so they don't get mushy), summer squash (frozen sliced for use in casseroles, soups or stews or frozen shredded for use in zucchini bread, muffins, cakes and cookies), sweet and hot peppers to be used in cooking after they are thawed, and some fruits like peaches or apricots, which can be frozen and then eaten as plain fruit when half-thawed or which can be used in pies, cobblers, and homemade ice cream. CANNING: There are many ways to preserve by canning. With some methods you use a boiling water bath and with others you must use a pressure canner. The most important thing is to always use safety-approved recipes and do not change the recipes unless various options are listed. Any cange you make to a canning recipe can alter the density or pH of the finished product and that can lead to the growth of various microorganisms that can be deadly for whoever eats that food. I do a lot of canning in a good year and not so much in a bad year. The items I most commonly can are tomatoes (as pasta sauce, canned stewed tomatoes, canned whole tomatoes and particularly as salsa), peppers, cucumbers canned as pickles, and jams, jellies, ice cream toppings and syrup. Most the jams and jellies are made from fruit, but I do make quite a lot of Habanero Gold pepper/apricot jelly and jalapeno jelly. DEHYDRATING: There are different methods you can use to dehydrate food. You can build your own solar dryer from plans found on the internet, you can purchase a stand-alone dehydrator or, if you have a oven that has a convection oven feature, you often can use it to dehydrate food. My stove has a convection oven mode and within that mode, it has a 'dehydrate' mode. I use my oven to dehydrate food all summer long. You can dry almost anything you raise. I mostly dehydrate tomatoes and peppers. I dehydrate thousands of bite-sized tomatoes in a good year and we eat them in the months where there are no fresh tomatoes from the garden. Dried peppers or garlic can be ground down into pepper flakes, pepper powder and garlic powder. With dehydration, the key is to dry the foods down to a very low moisture level for storage in your pantry. If you don't get them dry enough, mold will form and grow. Or, you can dehydrate them and then store them in the freezer. Some produce can be allowed to dry on the plant. This includes beans and southern peas. Then all you do is remove them from the hulls and store them in jars or bags. FERMENTATION: Some foods can be preserved using various methods of fermentation. About the only fermentation I do involves making sauerkraut out of cabbage. Some people also make kim-chi. LONG-TERM REFRIGERATION: Some veggies will hold a very long time in the refrigerator, including carrots and cabbages. I have kept both in the extra refrigerator in the garage for months with no discernable loss of quality. Leeks can be kept in a refrigerator for several weeks. There are many ways to store food and you'll learn through experimentation which ones work best for you. Different people like different things. Some people prefer to can their green beans in a pressure canner, while others prefer to freeze them. Different strokes for different folks. The best guide to food preservation is the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation. It is the bible of food preservation and you will not find unsafe recipes or recommendations there. Otherwise, there are often good recipes on the websites of companies that make and sell canning supplies and they can be trusted. The Ball Blue Book of Canning is a good basic guide and can be purchased on the canning aisle at places like Wal-Mart for about $10.00. If this is your first year to raise a garden, I wouldn't worry excessively about how to store the produce,and I wouldn't spend a lot of money on food preservation supplies until I knew I was going to have a surplus to store. Sometimes it takes a few years of gardening experience to raise enough of a produce surplus that you have to worry about long-term storage. You also have to have a pretty large garden to produce large amounts of most produce. I love filling up our freezers, canning closet and root cellar (tornado shelter) with food from our garden, but it can be very time-consuming. It is better to start small and work your way up to processing ever-enlarging amounts of produce as you gain experience. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: National Center for Home Food Preservation

Since I posted this, I have had another phone call from her - it is almost getting to the point where I get the giggles! It is not that I don't help people, I've made over 80 full size or bigger quilts and I only have one on my bed and one on the sofa - all the others have been given to others. But I hate being manipulated. The fact that I quilt does not obligate me into starting/finishing a quilt for anyone who is looking for the finished project w/o putting anything into it. She did keep saying how much work this is! Yep! And how long it was taking. Yep! She still hasn't caught on that it would take me the same amount of time and work. I only had one other time that someone really tried to take advantage. The women's leader at church thought it would be nice to give a baby quilt to every baby born in the church and to give away a quilt to one woman every year at the women's retreat. She turned to me and said the first baby quilt should go to the newest baby born the week before. I was stunned as I realized 'we' meant 'me'. I asked her who would be making the quilt, 'You.' I asked how the quilt would be from the group and different from the one I had already made and given to this mother. 'Well, we have donated fabric to you, haven't we?' NO! Then she said, 'well, you're still making the quilt to give away at retreat, right?' By then I was getting over being stunned and was moving into being indignant. I asked again, how this quilt would be from the group - would everyone be doing a block and I would just be assembling? She looked at me quite shocked and exclaimed that she did not even have a machine. So once it was clear that what she expected was for me to make the quilts and let her put her name on them, I said NO! I had a back log of projects I was working on and did not have time to do that, and it was being rather presumptuous of her to tell me what I would make. And she even said, 'well, you'd have a whole year to make one; that's enough time.' I think that is when my 'No' was enabled! (I even gave her an older, but in good-working-order Kenmore machine.)

How about a "bobbin" that holds as much thread as a spool does, or--better yet, an adjustable bobbin case or spindle that would take any of the three types of regular spools, just the way you can use different sizes and shapes of spools up top in your machine? I'd love to buy 2 spools of each thread, knowing that one will serve as bobbin and the other up top and they will pretty much last for the same amount of time. Something else I would like, which I think really doable, is metal-borders on all the rulers. If I am going to put a nick in the blade of a rotary cutter, at least the metal borders would keep me from gouging pieces out of the rulers.

Always test everything before using it on your quilt. I tried the PressNSeal for hand quilting some floral designs. To draw the design onto the PNS, I tried ballpoint pen, Sharpie pen, and also some of the lighter color markers. The problem I had, even though I let them all dry for 48 hours first, the color of the marker kept rubbing off onto my thread. The thread got darker and darker. When I took it out, there were dots on the fabric. Using it as a stencil might work with removable markers, but I'm not sure if chalk would stay on the fabric when you pull off the PNS? BlueBars