This whole thing was to avoid any fermentation since I am such an un-kultured person and can't be trusted caretaking a yeast cell. Admittedly, the only reason I may have been successful thru about 10 years of brewing beer was that the entire process was at Dad's place. When I took the equipment home, I produced something so unpleasant that I had to throw it out! We didn't always produce Grade A beer, especially there at first, but we kind of caught on. Maybe it was just Dad who caught on . . . Well, David, Ms. Ziedrich in the "The Joy of Pickling" recipe told me to, "Drain the vegetables, pressing out excess liquid." (There in that Oct. 22, 2010 post link.) It could have been that I didn't need to squeeze the life outta them but I thought that would be the "fun" part! Steve

Shelley, The official temperatures are measured at 5' above the ground, so the temperature at whatever height your tomatoes are growing could be different from the temperature that was officially recorded. It sounds like you and your plants got lucky. Sometimes at 32 degrees, you don't get frost settling on the plants if the wind is blowing at a certain level all night. Sometimes I've had plants with no damage at 30 or 31 degrees and I've had them totally frozen at 32 degrees. There are lots of variables involved including how long you stay at or below freezing, the dewpoint, the RH, the wind speed, etc. How long your temperature stays at or below freezing also matters. A few minutes at 32 degrees might not harm a plant, especially if no frost forms, but a couple of hours might. If your temperature drops to 28 degrees, that is considered a hard freeze and generally tomato plants are very severely damaged or dead from a hard freeze. With a light freeze or a light frost, you might have plant damage but not plant death. If your ground was fairly warm, then maybe between it and the fence, there was enough absorbed heat to radiate back at the plants and keep them warm enough to avoid damage. Having sloping property, there have been times when the plants at the lower portion of the garden either froze or had some frost damage while the plants at the higher elevation in the garden had no damage. I've also seen hit and miss freeze and frost damage where some tomato plants are dead, some are damaged and some are pretty much untouched. I always plant a couple of rows of tomato plants at the highest part of the sloping garden plot so that I know at least some of the tomato plants have a good chance of surviving. Carol, Man, that was too cold. I thought it felt really chilly when I stepped outdoors and it was 44 degrees. Of course, a couple of mornings ago, when I stepped outside first thing around sunrise it was 63 degrees, so naturally 44 would feel cold by comparison.u,. I was surprised when I woke up early this morning and saw they had added a lot more counties to the Freeze Warning and Frost Advisory categories. I'd be mad if I went to sleep expecting the plants to be fine in the morning, and woke up and found them frosted or frozen. Sometimes it happens though, as the weather doesn't always behave as expected. I hope this was the last cold night of the spring. We don't want the Easter Bunny freezing his little cotton tail while he's out hiding the Easter eggs. Dawn

Depends on how dry it is. The liquid content of finished kraut varies widely. Some liquid is preferred so that it doesn't turn as mushy when thawed. So yes you may need to add some but I don't think it has to be covered. The more common recommendation is to seal it in bags - zip lock bags can be filled and most of the air carefully squeezed out. With vacuum bags you can fill the vacuum bag, set it in the freezer to partially freeze, then vacuum out the bag. There used to be a good discussion about how to do it on sauerkraut.com that is probably still available there. Dave

Model JCB2059GES. Does the picture show that the cappilary tube has a restriction preventing the condenser from working?