Before I ever heard of Garden Web: 8 pints apricot jam 6 pints apricot preserve 12 half-pints sour cherry jam 14 pints and 14 half-pints strawberry jam 8 pints raspberry jam After I found this discussion board: 3 pints mango chutney 5 pints plum chutney 4 pints plum sauce After I bought Christine Ferber's Book on August 31 and a whole new world opened up to me: 12 half-pints green tomato with cinnamon 24 half-pints blackberry chocolate orange jam 15 half-pints raspberry chocolate jam 15 half-pints Vanilla bosc pear jam with pine nuts and walnuts 12 half-pints peach jam with black rum 5 half-pints peach melba jam 4 pints mango lime marmelade 5 pints plum jam with anise 12 half-pints Anjou Pear jam with Thai spices 5 half-pints spiced peach jam 4 half-pints of rhubarb jam with honey and rosemary 4 half-pints of white nectarine jam with rosemary 5 half-pints of quince jam with ginger 6 half-pints bartlett pear with balsamic vinegar and spices I lay my obsession at the doorstep of anyone who ever mentioned Christine Ferber on this website. I haunt the Farmer's Market. I am trying to get my hands on crabapples even this late to try to make my own pectin. I have made my plans for all the jams I can make in the winter - after all, grapefruit, oranges, mangoes and coconut are never/always in season in Calgary. I bought new wooden spoons to be used only in jam making. I went to Williams Sonoma on my way home from a nasty root canal one day in September and found a hand hammered copper confiture pan, imported from France. I'd never seen such a thing before. It has style and substance. I was feeling mightily sorry for myself, and thus, it now belongs to me. Everyone I know is enabling me, because of course, they will be the recipients of all this bounty. Is there a 12 step program? Anyone?

After reviewing my records, I've made a few changes to my list as well. Since I had an early start this year - which doesn't happen often - I'm growing some longer-season varieties. This mostly affects my soybeans, which I have yet to list. Trials are bolded: Beans Bird Egg#3 - pole, shelly Champagne - pole, flat green-podded snap Czechoslovakian - pole, flat purple-podded snap Dolloff - pole, shelly Fortex - pole, main crop snap Grandma Robert's Purple Pole Isla (a long season pole shelly) Light Brown Zebra - bush, dry Madeira Clem & Sarah's Big Bean - bush, shelly Poletscka - pole Portugal - pole, shelly Schwarze Witwe - pole, wax Soissons Vert - pole, shelly & dry Uzice Porcelain - a.k.a. Uzice. Shelly. This year's trial will determine whether it is a rangy bush, or a weak climbing pole. Uzice Speckled Wax - pole, wax Added: Woods Mountain Crazy Beans - bush, snap Limas Cave Dweller (Black Seed Coat) - bush Sieva, Mottled - pole Runner Bianco de Spagna - pole, white seed (thanks to Drloyd) Gigandes - pole? white seed, from Greece (thanks to Fusion) (both will be trialed as shellies) Cowpeas / Yardlongs Bush Sitao Var. BS-3 - semi-bush snap, tan & white seeds, from Philippines CES-18-6 Fagiolino Dolico Veneto - semi-bush, very early eyed pea) MN 157 - bush, purple podded calico, dry Yardlong, Galante - pole, red & white seeds, from Philippines Yardlong, Sierra Madre - pole, red & white seeds, from Philippines Yardlong, Yard and 1/2 - pole??? red & white seeds (thanks to Grandmotherbear) Yardlong, Yancheng Bush - bush (duh! ;-) red seeds Peas Black Eyed Susan - shelling Bill Jump - soup Golderbse - soup Purple Pod Parsley - shelling (unstable, I'm still selecting for all-purple pods) Vantana Matar - soup Added: Prebohaty - soup Limestone - pod Miscellaneous Adzuki, Buff Adzuki, Takara Early Black gram Chickpea, Brown Popping (the popping chickpea mentioned in Carol Deppe's book) Plus 27 soybeans planted for edamame & dry seed. The cancellations are rescheduled for 2013. And most importantly... it's all planted!!! :-) No repeat of last year's calamity.

OK - I thought the PH reading might have been quite too far acidic based on how well other things have done in the same soil (different location in the yard) and the meter was well, crappy. I have not done a legit soil sample (I'm lazy, yeah) however... I did still have a jar of soil in water I used to gauge the soil particle consistency. (Laziness might have paid off) I saw it sitting around after these responses and decided to try this out. I shook the jar, which has been sealed since I took the dirt out, and divided the portions equally in two containers. You might guess what happened next. Baking Soda into one - Vinegar into the other. Neither of the samples reacted before or after agitation, except for the ghost of a pop in the cup with vinegar added, but certainly no vigorous reaction. In the spirit of bad science, I added a little of the opposite to each, and got the expected fizz. This can't possibly mean that my soil is close to PH neutral, can it? I figure I'm missing something here. I will certainly try and educate myself on legitimate fertilization as well. I hadn't really thought about the hard water we have here, and though i was planning on doing the gradual timing as mentioned, looks like i still have quite a bit to research. As far as the stink bugs... they just take bites from everything, leaving puckers on the fruit, which is lame. I think that the large part of my infestation last year was my own fault from bad practice, but that's been amended. The foil sheets are more for bugs that do ground egg-laying. May be an old wives tale, but i've seen chatter that it can help prevent bugs from laying eggs in the roots. but who knows. Either way, I've been using nematodes as well, and that seemed to help. All i have to do now is handle the first wave of cucumber beetle invasion without losing all of my cucurbits again.

It's hard to make generalities about over 1 billion people, lol. But I have found that there are many, many Chinese families who don't stir-fry at all, or do it very seldom. Not every American family eats burgers and hot dogs, either, for a local analogy. I guess if others judged American culture by TV ads and billboards, they would think we all lived on a daily diet of McDonald's Big Macs! But in general, many Asian cuisines do have a "triple path". There is home cooking; there is restaurant cooking; and there is banquet, or feast, food. I was talking to my Hong Kong-born Chinese-Portugese DH a few weeks ago, and he (finally) remembered to tell me a story about one of his uncles who died over 15 yrs ago. This uncle was famous in the family for making the Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce, or ho yau gai lan as it used to be spelled (I'm terrible with the new spellings, sorry). I've done this dish, and it seems very simple. Blanch the gai lan, stir-fry it quickly, drizzle it with oyster sauce. What's so hard about it? DH told me his uncle was so meticulous and painstaking about doing this dish, it was intimidating even to just watch him. Every cut had to be a precise size, the water had to be just the right temperature, the timing was down to the second. The wok had to be heated for XX number of minutes with just enough oil but not too much; the tossing and last-minute steaming done always the same way. In six decades of eating, DH says his uncle's gai lan remains the best. And every time, because he was so exacting about it, it was always perfect. But it was a lot of work, done to ensure that nothing was left to chance. He very seldom made it, in fact. Just the news that there was going to be a party and that Uncle had promised to make his gai lan, was enough to make everybody, even reluctant-to-socialize teenagers, show up for dinner! Oh, and outside of the gai lan, hardly anyone in DH's family, all 200+ members in Vancouver BC, stir-fries. Most of them don't even own a wok, which is interesting because otherwise they've kept their HK culture intact very assiduously. Unlike the American relatives, all of whom by the second generation barely remember their Cantonese, all the Canadian relatives speak Cantonese at home, so that even the fourth generation little kids are bi-lingual.