I have been making pepper jelly for decades, always using just sugar, some hot peppers ground up with some bell peppers, sugar and vinegar. For the past few years none of the Certo has jelled my jellies and I'm about to pull my hair out. NOTHING has changed with the way I make this and I used Certo years, decades ago, but I frankly think their formula has changed/diluted. I have had to remake the jelly sometimes three times which turns out to cost me tons and make each little Christmas gift worth over ten bucks a bottle. This is getting maddening. Someone surely must have a solution to getting the Certo recipe to work. I folled it down to the nth degree exactly and all I have is runny syrup. I'm not going through this again this year. HELP!! I need someone's input who has solved this problem with the Certo and knows how to make the jelly jell the First TIME. Thanks--

But mostly, I want seed from this plant. It is so tenacious about living, that I want some copies next year. I'm worried that it's too late in the year, but I'm going to try and grow this one out far enough to get some seed. **** with those blossoms and you being in Atlanta it shouldn't be a problem to get mature fruits. But I do hope you get some single blossoms b'c with so called megablooms you can get fusing of the fruits and then there's a greater chance of getting crossed seeds b;c of the possibility of different blossoms in that one megabloom being independently X pollinated and then the several fruits becoming one. And I noticed you weren't bagging blossoms but perhaps this plant is far enough away from others to help ensure no X pollinations. OTOH seed for Big Rainbow is readily available at many places. ( smile) Carolyn

ML- my MIL had actually given me her jewelry and silver shortly before she died. She hadn't been sick or anything, she just wanted them to be passed on and I was the only close female and mother of her only gd. Also, she knew I treasured family things - and old things. When my kids were little a neighbor girl (close friend) died. They passed on her skates to my dd. A yr later when our oldest ds died we also gave special items of his to his close friends. dd (about 10) decided she wanted to give her other friend her watch now while she was alive. Wow. what we can learn from kids. I told her that was a great idea, so off she went with her treasured watch. I encouraged the other kids to do the same. My bgf at the time admired a diamond chip ring I wore - so, I just took it off and gave it to her. It meant so much to her she wore it with her wedding rings. It wasn't an expensive ring by any means. In more recent yrs my sister has often admired a 'jade tree' (oriental) that I inherited from my MIL (it's very small - maybe 8" tall w/little pieces of 'jade' (don't know if real) for leaves). She thought I planned to leave it to her in my will. A yr or 2 ago I gave it to her for Christmas. It has a front position in her china cabinet. Decades ago another sister collected Hummels and I had lots of them from MIL so I gave her a bunch of them. and maybe 10 yrs ago now I sent my #3 son my wedding ring and his ggf's pocket watch for Christmas (I had no idea what to buy him, refused to buy something he might not want or need. I knew that of all the kids he also treasured old family things (he's the future 'keeper' of the family history). Also, my wedding ring would mean something to one of the kids (not me). He later told me that those were the best presents he had ever received! Another yr I reprinted a bunch of pics from his childhood (some with siblings and/or pets) and put in a small album. Again he loved it. He told me 'keep things like that coming'. He'll get all the family pics when I die but why make him wait til then to have some to go thru and show to show to his kids? In the 90's I gave my Apple dishes (tons of them!) and some silver serving pieces to another bgf. She did 'Sunday' dinners and other entertaining. I didn't, my kids were grown and in other states. She'd get great use of them, I wouldn't. I ran across a beautiful crystal bowl the other day in a box and decided that I'd be keeping that out - to USE now, just for me. Time to have it out regularly and enjoy seeing it. I also plan to use the good china just for me. now that I think about those Hummels - I ran across more of them while unpacking. My BIL bought one each Christmas and sent to my MIL. Those will be good things to tuck into a Christmas pkg to the kids. I like it much better knowing these people are enjoying the things now rather then them being in a box in my closet. Monk - that is the one show I've watched on regular tv in recent yrs. well, until it went off. darn. I didn't watch the first few yrs of it, so caught them on reruns.

We offer first to family/friends. If nobody wants it, it goes to charity. My MIL was sure her house stuff was worth money. It wasn't. However, family members were happy to take the big furniture, so she didn't feel bad. Oddly, the various tschotskes DH and I couldn't stand, made her several hundred $$$ from an estate liquidator. Who knew, LOL? There is a wonderful charity here run by our city. They collect ONLY business clothes - cleaned, pressed, on hangers - suitable for job interviews. Low-income residents can go to their various training classes, which include what to do/not to do on job interviews and how to properly fill out job applications. For those attendees who don't have nice clothes for interviews, the charity allows them to pick two outfits for free. When my DH and I retired, we brought them enough to fill an 8' clothes rack. My MIL just passed away and I realized many of her clothes also qualified as "interview ready". DH and I cleaned out our closets again. His was clothes that had gotten too small or shrunk (he's fond of 100% cotton and some of that stuff shrinks more than others). I had hung on to some of my favorite work clothes, including some designer stuff, but finally decided after five years of retirement it was time to pass them along. So there went another 8' clothes rack out of the house last week! We also sorted through our books. We have around 2-4,000 books at any given time. Out went a load of those yesterday to the local library for their monthly sales. But the core of our collections remain: my art books, his hobby reference books, and the fiction novels we deem worth keeping and re-reading. Of these, only the art books are worth anything, and only to collectors. After I sorted through my art books we asked a couple of friends if they were interested in any that we planned to get rid of. They took two paper bags full. They were happy and so were we! Our collection is valuable only to us, especially since much of it is out of print. I used to give very elaborate dinner parties in the '70's. I had six different sets of interchangeable dinnerware and handmade bronze flatware, with lots of serving pieces collected from various places. Entertaining has changed and nobody does this stuff any longer. The main part of the dinnerware was a classic Mikasa bone china with an embossed gold rim, in a service for 12. None of my Millennial friends was interested in it, but fortunately one of our younger Boomer friends was complaining about her grandmother's soft-paste china. Such patterns can't go through the DW so she had to hand-wash it, so as a working mother (she was the breadwinner, in fact) it was too time-consuming to use often. She was familiar with our china and said she would be thrilled to have it. Made her ecstatic, and opened up space for new plain china for us. Yes, I still have the bronze flatware. Nobody else wants it, like silver it has to be kept polished or in bluecloth. Doesn't take up much room in a drawer. Oddly, one of the modestly valuable things I own might someday be thrown out by some relative who doesn't realize what they are. Back in the psychedelic '60's when impresario Bill Graham presented unknown local bands at the Winterland ballroom in San Francisco, for publicity they did not only posters, but fliers and postcards. I have half a dozen pristine, unused postcards of concerts listing Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Cream, Moody Blues, Blue Oyster Cult, etc., stuffed in a box in the garage.