I'm still eating spaghetti squash picked last September. Most of them are about 2.5-3.0 lbs. Three hill got me about 12-14 squashes. I just cooked one, and got 1.5 lbs of squash out of it. I'm not generally a fan of winter squash, but I do eat the spaghetti variety. I have to say that I think the idea that spaghetti squash can replace pasta doesn't make much sense to me. I tried it with tomato sauce, and it just didn't work. I just eat it as a side dish - no sauces, but maybe herbs/seasonings. In spite of the fact that it kind of looks like spaghetti, it's still a winter squash, and tastes like it.

Timf7, Thanks for your ideas. Our weather warmed back up almost immediately after I wrote my earlier post, but that night I had gone out and picked many of the still-green peppers, all the small zucchini, and every tomato that showed any pink at all. I brought them all inside and put the tomatoes and peppers on the kitchen table together, for lack of a better idea. A few days later I noticed that all the peppers had turned bright red! I had no idea bell peppers would do this off the vine, like tomatoes will. I wasn't surprised to see the tomatoes turning red, but the peppers were a very pleasant surprise. Aren't tomatoes and peppers related to each other? I wonder if the chemicals the tomatoes exuded helped the peppers turn red? I just might get in the habit of picking my peppers green and letting them turn red inside, now, because it takes so much longer for them to turn red outside. And often they start to rot or are bothered by pests in that awkward period between green and red. I think I will try cutting down the entire tomato plants and hanging them upside down in my basement, once cold weather really sets in here. I have heard of people doing that with geraniums down here, to overwinter them. Of course I don't expect that will overwinter the tomatoes, but maybe it will let the plant's "juices" flow right on down into the fruit. And I suppose it's as good a place as any to wait for the tomatoes to turn red. Sometimes they rot on my kitchen counter while they are turning color. Last weekend I saw bou-coups of bees, both honey bees and bumblebees, all over my lima bean plants, so I guess I was wrong about the insects being gone, too. My beans just keep right on producing, in fact they seem to like this cold weather better than anything they've seen so far this year. I don't think I'll be coming up to Chicago anytime soon, but if you're in Atlanta you're certainly welcome to come and get some tomatoes, green or otherwise.

Newer version of Annie's Salsa - BWB only Annie's Salsa 8 cups tomatoes, peeled, chopped and drained 2 1/2 cups chopped onion 1 1/2 cups chopped green pepper 3 to 5 chopped jalapenos (for milder leave out seeds and ribs) 6 cloves minced garlic 2 tsp cumin (optional) 2 tsp pepper 1/8 cup canning salt 1/4 c fresh cilantro (optional) 1/3 c sugar (optional) 1 cup cider vinegar (see note on subbing lemon or lime juice option) 16 oz canned tomato sauce (to adjust density) 8-16 oz canned tomato paste (to adjust density) Mix all ingredients, bring to a boil, boil 10 minutes. Pour into hot jars, process pints for 15 minutes in BWB. Makes 6 pints. _________ A lot of changes have been made to this recipe over the years. Some people like lemon or lime juice in place of some or all of the vinegar, that's fine. (Note from Sheila - I like half lemon half lime.) Some people leave out the cilantro, that's fine too. Do not increase! Some people add more hot peppers or fewer onions, fine as long as you keep the same total measurements. (Note this is what NCHFP does in their new Choice Salsa recipe.) Some people leave out the sugar, that's fine. You can scoop out the goo in the middle of the tomatoes with your thumbs when I'm peeling and chopping for a less seedy version, so it's 8 cups of chopped tomatoes without the seeds and goo. Most who make it regularly as well as Annie recommend using a variety of different slicing tomatoes, not paste types, for best flavor and consistency. (Note: use the tomato sauce and paste to adjust the consistency of the final product to a "sloshy" consistency.) According to Annie "My salsa is not as thick as Heinz catsup but it's thicker than taco sauce. If you don't like it quite as thick or sweet, cut down the amount of paste. I would add some, then taste. Reducing that ingredient shouldn't affect the safety of the recipe. I use equal amounts of sauce and paste. You can pull it off the heat at any point and adjust for flavor. Before I cook it I check for salt, sugar, check the consistency. Add more pepper or cumin if I want. When I first started making this salsa, tomato sauce and paste came in 8 and 16 ounce cans. Like everything else, they've now been downsized, so now I have to use partial cans." Does anybody have good versions of the other recipes that have weird symbols in them for measurements?

Sheri, That's a shame the cool front couldn't give y'all a couple of days of relief. Yesterday morning it was 68 degrees when I stepped outside and it felt heavenly. Even though the afternoon got pretty hot, it still was about 94 or 95, so 9 or 10 degrees cooler than we had been the last few days. I have to force myself to go out into the garden and work for a couple of ours before it gets too hot. With the goat head stickers, personally I'd likely cut them down with the string trimmer (if it was cooler, I'd take the time to pull them or dig them out), then rake up every last sticker head so they don't stay in the garden and sprout next year. By the way, stickers are a sign the soil is lacking in humus and organic matter, but you probably know that already. We had stickers in our front lawn when we first moved here, but after adding organic matter just by chopping up leaves and leaving them on the ground in that area every fall, we now have improved the soil so that stickers no longer sprout there. They still sprout in our bar ditch and in our driveway though. I wouldn't put black plastic within 100 yards of my tomato plants (or any other desirable plants, including watermelon) unless I was going to immediately put 2 to 4" of organic matter/mulch on top of it. Black plastic will heat up the soil underneath it like crazy in our temperatures and will cook the roots of your plants. While you can use black plastic to warm up cold soil in spring, you have to either remove it or mulch over it heavily before hot temperatures arrive. The only thing I used black plastic for is to kill everything in a new area I want to plant the following year. The other day, I looked at the current soil temperature 2" below bare soil at our Mesonet station and it was 111 degrees at mid-afternoon. Imagine how much hotter it would be under black plastic since black absorbs heat! You could use layers of newspaper, cardboard or even the dark-color woven-cloth landscape mulch cloth, but only if you're piling stuff on top of the landscape cloth. Just don't buy the cheap landscape fabric at some big box stores that have millions of tiny perforations to let water flow through, because weeds grow up through those holes and grow downward through them too and it is worthless. I buy a roll of woven landscape fabric every year at CostCo (similar to Sam's Club) for about $40 that is 4' wide and either 200' or 300' long. I use it in my tomato beds, and pile mulch on top of it. It helps keep the weeds down a great deal, but I still have to religiously pull up any weeds that sprout in the mulch before their roots work their way down through the cloth (which they will). If you aren't seeing new growth on the tomato plants by this Sunday, then their main issue is not a lack of nutrition but then has to be something else like a serious soil deficiency or imbalance between nutrients, a disease or a pest that is very serious. (sigh) I cannot imagine what it is, although knowing you are growing in only lightly-improved clay makes me suspect the soil is staying too compacted and the roots may be starving for oxygen too. Remember that plant roots grow in the SPACE between soil particles, not in the soil itself. If the clay is barely improved and heavily compacted, the roots have precious little open space between soil particles because with clay the soil particles aggregate together tightly. Maybe when you send Jay the photos he'll see some symptoms he recognizes and can help you more than I have. Not to be bossy (OK, maybe sort of big-sister type bossiness is in play here), but I'd do the soil test right now. The time to fix your garden is this summer or fall, not next winter or spring. You need to be able to add what the soil needs now so whatever you add can begin improving the soil now. I know that one of the main problems in your clay is a lack of biological activity due to compacted clay and a lack of oxygen. Fixing a problem like that means adding tons of organic matter and then giving the soil microbes time to do their thing. You cannot improve soil and plant into a week or two later and expect great results. At a minimum, once you have been adding organic matter in large amounts every year and feel your soil is in pretty good shape, you can get away with adding a little organic matter in the fall, and organic fertilizer in the spring just before planting time. However, when you are just beginning the work to improve soil, you need to add heavy amounts of organic matter in the fall and give it time to break down and work. Soil is very complicated and you need to think of it as an entire ecosystem in and of itself. You have to return bad soil to good soil by building up the ecosystem and letting it function. That's entirely different from adding a little organic matter and thinking the job is done. With the hay, yes, I cut it up and mix it into cups of soil and raise beans in it. If they don't die, that bale of hay is good to use. So far, so good. Jay, Sheri's tomatoes befuddle me and all my early impressions of what it might be were wrong. It can't be nematodes because she has clay, and it wasn't spider mites. Personally, I thought they looked like plants that had nematodes AND spider mites! So, maybe you can look at them and figure out something. I would think it is a combintion of clay soil, some pest that affects plant vigor and a disease or diseases, but which ones? Mike, You know what, we really do need a special thread just for venting about our tomato plants because it is a bad tomato year. Blaming the weather is appropriate, but that is little consolation. Uh oh, your plants are starting to sound like Sheri's. I hope y'all's plants aren't early indicators of some major tomato plague in Oklahoma this year. I have started fall plants too, but so far they are small and seem in no big hurry to grow. Of course, our highs have been in the 99-104 range for most of the last week, and I have to keep reminding myself that if I was a tomato, I wouldn't want to grow in those temps either. I haven't completely given up on my spring tomatoes, but I'm moving more in that direction every day. The fruit on them has been ripening fine, but now stink bugs have arrived, so I have less confidence that the quality of the fruit will remain unchanged. Luckily, we have had a big early (April and May) harvest but our mid- (June) and late-(July) season harvest will be poor. I never expect much but bite-sized tomatoes to be ripening in August in any year. Every day I am more and more tempted to just yank out everything but the plants that produce bite-sized fruit. Oh, by everything, I mean all the tomato plants....not everything else. A lot of the tomato plants are just a waste of space this year, and I think I'd be better off yanking them and replacing them with all kinds of southern peas, winter squash, okra and pole beans. I think it is likely I'll do just that around the beginning of July, unless we have a major break in the weather that gives the plants lots of moisture and cool air. It isn't a bad garden year at all. We had huge harvests of lettuce, potatoes, onions, leeks, corn and green beans, but only a moderate harvest of everything else, and no broccoli or cabbage and relatively few snap peas. The pepper plants are covered in peppers, the melons have lots of blooms and small fruit, and the cuckes are growing great and about to start flowering. The cukes are late because I planted them in late May after I pulled out the sugar snaps. They're doing great considering how young the plants are. It is just that the weather this year has been hard on the tomatoes. Even in a perfect year, we have a very narrow window of opportunity here when the temps are right for blooming, pollination and fertilization to occur. If the heat arrives too early, or if late cool weather keeps the plants from growing fast enough after they're transplanted, then the narrow window of opportunity almost slams shut before fruit set occurs. That's pretty much what has happened to many people here in OK this year. Or, hail hit and destroyed or badly set back the plants. Our only hope is for an occasional cool spell to drop the temps enough for fruit set, and that's really iffy. I don't know that it is worth waiting for a cool spell if you're having to water the garden weekly as I am in an almost total absence of moisture just to keep the plants alive. At some point, you're spending more on water than you're going to get in eventual fruit. I'm at that point. I noticed several of our 'usual' gardeners here in our county didn't even plant gardens at all this year, or didn't plant tomatoes at all, or have given up and stopped watering. They knew by how dry we were/are that a tomato harvest was iffy, and so did I, but it is hard for me to not at least try for a crop because tomatoes are my favorite food. Well, maybe they're tied with chocolate in the category of favorite food, but I don't try to grow chocolate. Dawn