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. 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.

Chandra, Assuming you effectively combat the bermuda, and you choose quality mix to fill your raised beds, I'd say you are in for a very prolific harvest. Yes, lots of uncontrollable things can happen, but if I counted correctly you've already got 8 large beds built with more to come? If you mulch and keep your weeds down, I think you'll be looking for cars to dump your excess produce in. P-mac, I did want to address this early. It's important enough that it dominates the talk in the Harvest Forum. So many more people are canning now than in recent histoy. By my way thinking, I can watch a new gardener try things that I anticipate aren't going to work, but let them do it for the experience. Innovation doesn't come from doing the tried and true. But to watch a beginning canner do things that could literally bring death, and not speak up would be very, very wrong. Since we haven't started talking specifically about what we're putting up yet, we can bring it up in a preventive manner. It's very important that people know to use tested recipes. There's that saying about "you don't yet know what you don't know." I'd just feel terrible if someone hurt themselves canning and we could have said something to prevent it. My first year out of college, a group of men I worked with went to a BBQ joint for lunch. They all got botulism poisoning from improperly prepared baked potatoes. Some were hospitalized, each of them over a week of work in the middle of tax season and everyone of them lost 15 to 20 pounds. It was horrifying to see what it did to them and it made lasting impression on me.

Megan, Oh, I am having a malfunctioning brain. I am in the middle of six batches of Habanero Gold and for some reason I thought you asked about it instead of Annie's Salsa. Where is my head today? I can't imagine honey wouldn't work as there is such a small amount in the recipe, and I feel better about it knowing Marcy has safely used honey in her salsa. Carol, I know. When I first found the recipe, I found the pressure canning version and, even though I have a pressure canner, I prefer BWB so I didn't try the salsa until a year or two later when I realized it could be water-bath canned. I, too, watch for the answers from Readinglady, Digdirt, Linda Lou, Annie and a couple of others because I know they know what they are talking about, and with some of the others, I am not as certain. I even miss Ken, even though he had his cranky moments, because his answers were always so technically correct. I have old canning books too, but if the recipes in them that I've used have worked out well, I keep using them. Many of the more modern changes apply more to pressure canning than BWB canning as far as I can tell, and I mostly BWB or freeze or dehydrate. With the new (OK, it is two years old now but still feels somewhat new to me) glass-topped stove not being ideal for canning, I'm afraid to put a loaded pressure canner on it. If the combination of weight/heat cracked the glass top, I'd be buying myself a new stove because it is not warrantied for the use of pressure canners. Marcy, I miss using my pressure canner, but the new glass-topped stove has a built-in dehydrator mode, so I like that better than the old stove. My newish glass-topped stove had an instruction manual that said, basically, you cannot can on this stove and if you do and you break the stove's cooktop, your warranty is voided. I do BWB but carefully because I know it is mostly discouraged for other reasons than just the cooktop breaking. The weight of my BWB even when filled shouldn't be heavy enough to be a problem like some people have had with a fully-loaded pressure canner breaking the glass top, and none of the BWB processing times are long enough that the cycling on/off of the heat is an issue. I know my burners cycle on and off to avoid overheating, but they never cool enough that the canner stops boiling, which some folks have experienced with the glass-top stove. Since most BWB times are for 10 or 15 minuts only, I don't think any of the BWB times keep the cooktop hot enough long enough to crack the glass as some people have experienced with pressure canners. If my burner cycled off long enough for the boiling to cease, I'd BWB can on the side burner on our grill outdoors or something. I think most of the people who have trouble with the glasstop stoves breaking or cracking have older models and that the newer models hold up better to canning, but I might be wrong about that. Also, we put the old stove in the garage and kept it in case I didn't like canning on the new stove, but I suppose we can give it away or sell it or something because I have canned for 3 summers now on the new stove and like it fine. Carol, My peppers, okra and beans were wilted today, so I put the sprinkler on the garden and I don't care if having wet foliage on the tomato plants kills them all because they are starting to burn up some in the heat too. I noticed the ones on the edge of the garden near the driveway are burning up the most. I need to get back to the jelly making. After I finish, unless it starts raining or something, I'm going back out to the garden to harvest beans, tomatoes and peppers. I might be making salsa again on Sat. or Sun. afternoon. The paste tomatoes are producing fine, but my heirloom tomatoes are slowing down and the plants are burning up. August might be a 'skimpy' month for tomato production. Dawn