Here it gets a bit complicated. Nurseries typically sell vegetable seedlings in packs of four or six - segmented plastic trays with one plant in each segment, which is what we gardeners immediately think of when we hear the term six-pack. It is expected that each of those seedlings will have grown past the point where that are at most risk, so each plant will survive, given adequate soil and care. I can't speak to your growing conditions, but here in Maine if I practice my technique on tomatoes, I can plant seeds in February, start harvesting in June, and stop in October, and expect each plant to give me 20 lbs. of tomatoes. If I plant cabbage, about 75 days after I plant seed, I get one cabbage per seed, and it's done. After harvesting cabbage that was planted in the beginning of the season, I still have some warm weather ahead of me, so I can plant a fast maturing summer crop or a longer maturing winter crop in the space where the cabbage previously grew. The tomatoes, which I grew under plastic to prolong my harvest, will be pulled in October or November, so I won't be able to plant a long-maturity-date crop there, because although things will survive in the greenhouse in winter, very few will actually grow, because of the limitations of lower temperatures and reduced hours of sunlight. Shorter days = less photosynthesis = less rapid growth. Most plants produce fruit via a complicated biochemical process related to the number of hours of light that they receive - this is an evolutionary adaptation that ensures that seeds are produced at the time of year when they are most likely to survive - it is rather complicated - but that is why plants have various growth cycles and seasons. One carrot seed = one carrot, but one chili pepper plant = 25 chilies. On the other hand, one carrot plant, allowed to go to seed, might produce 400 seeds, but a chili pepper plant might only produce 200 (these are just meant as examples, not based on fact - I don't save many seeds). The reason it's important to plant a lot of seeds is that there are a certain percentage that will not germinate, some will be lost as seedlings, some will be lost during the growing process, etc. As your experience grows, that mortality rate drops dramatically, but those losses in the beginning make you aware of why certain things are done a certain way - it's much more effective than simply being told what to do. One of the best ways to see the whole process is to plant radishes. 1 seed = 1 radish. They will, in the right conditions, germinate in about 4 days and be ready to harvest in 3 or 4 weeks. If you like radishes, you buy a big bag of seeds, and every week you plant as many radishes as you think you will eat in a week. In one month, you have a weeks' worth of radishes ready to pick and eat, and every week after that you have more. You pick all you want, when you want - you can pick them as big as the end of your little finger, or wait till they're the size of a golf ball (or a softball, with some varieties). You can grow them in red, pink, purple, white, black, or green on the outside and pink on the inside, and some can weigh several pounds. At a certain point in the radish growth cycle, the root starts to get woody, and a stem develops from the rosette of leaves. A few weeks later, little white flowers develop, and guess what? They're delicious! They taste like radishes, and are, in my opinion, even better than radishes in an elegant salad, but don't eat them all, because once the flowers get pollinated, they develop into little seed pods, which look like miniature beans - and they're delicious too! There are some varieties of radish that are grown specifically for the seed pod, which in some cuisines is pickled. Almost every vegetable has this enormous diversity of varieties - there are hundreds of different tomatoes, and thousands of lettuces. Many of them are not offered as plants because the demand isn't there, or because the plant won't transplant well, or because, as with some radishes, they grow so quickly the retailer won't risk having them ripen in the six-pack before he has a chance to sell it, but buying by seed gives you the opportunity to select from tens of thousands of vegetable varieties, most of which you cannot buy in a grocery store. Let's talk broccoli and cauliflower. These are closely related plants, and can even be cross bred. They are grown, ordinarily, to produce one large head per plant. Broccoli is green (usually, it can be purple) cauliflower is white (but it can be orange, or green, or purple). With broccoli, after you cut off the big head, you can let the plant grow, and where the leaf meets the stem you will get a new smaller head. If the plant is grown well, the number of smaller heads can equal, in weight, the size of the one large head, effectively doubling the yield of the plant. If you planted the broccoli at the right time, it may be worthwhile to do that, but, depending on the season, it may be to your advantage to remove that plant and replace it with another crop that will give you a different yield more appropriate to the season. As an example, you could probably plant broccoli now. It is predicted to be mature in 60 days. The variety you plant has only fair side-shoot production, so you would plan to replace that plant in the middle of April. In April, it will be nice and warm, so you can start planting summer crops in the garden, and cucumbers would be a good choice... they don't respond well to transplanting, they don't share diseases with broccoli, and they will mature in 75 days, producing 15 or more cucumbers on a well-grown plant. Now you have a plant that will be in that space for 90 days. It will give you possibly 8 pounds of cucumbers over 2 weeks’ time. In the beginning of August, that plant will be done producing, so you take it out. It's too late to put another summer crop there - the days are getting shorter, and it will be too cool for good ripening and flavor development for some things. On the other hand, radicchio, which likes warm germinating conditions, and forms good heads with nice color in cooler ones, and takes about 70 days to be ready, would be a great crop to plant where the cucumbers were. Even better, in the space it took to grow one broccoli plant that gave you one head, and one cucumber plant that gave you 15 cucumbers, you can grow 4 radicchio, with a few carrots and radishes to keep them company. After you harvest the radicchio it is approaching the coolest time of the year, so your options are more limited, but it happens that spinach will germinate and grow well in cool conditions, is ready to pick in 35 days, and can be harvested almost continuously through the winter. Even better, spinach tastes best in February and March, unlike any you can buy at a grocery. When it's done... time to plant broccoli - except now you have a lot more experience, so you're tempted by Brussels sprouts, or Romanesco cauliflower, or Belgian endive. The point of all this is to say that it is very difficult to estimate yield, because it is so variable. It depends on what and when you plant, how you manage your succession planting, what the bugs and deer do, frosts, hail... it never ends. The easiest way to deal with this, your first year, is to make a map of the garden, and a short list of plants you know that you want to grow. On your list, lettuce, carrots, and spinach can be planted now. Yu can buy lettuce seedlings in six-packs so if you eat a lot of lettuce, get a few six-packs to transplant, so you can harvest them in a few weeks, but get packages of seeds for all three, so you can plant a short row of seeds every week, which will give you a short row to harvest every week. When it starts getting warmer, those plants won't do as well, so put the rest of the seeds in a cool dark dry place and save them until fall, when it is time to start planting the cool weather crops again. This year, you should buy most of your plants as seedlings started in six-packs, but those will not be as easily available in summer or fall, so you need to buy seed for the crops you want to plant later - the good varieties will sell out, and you will have less selection if you wait. This is all pretty detailed and complicated, but it will make a lot of sense once you get started. That is why I emphasize the importance of defining why you are gardening - if it is to save money, you will want to grow different varieties than if it is for gourmet produce, or to have a colorful backyard, or to be able to serve home-grown at dinner parties - and you CAN do all three - but that decision makes it easier to narrow down all the choices that make it seem so overwhelming.

Sour salt and citric acid are the same thing. There is no question about that. Health food stores carry citric acid. Have you checked them? And as I said in your other long thread, you are clearly shopping in the wrong stores for canning supplies but since we have no idea where you live, we can't direct you to the better stores. You'll have to find them yourself. But if you can't find it or you don't want to spend the money on it and you don't want to order online - as you have made abundently clear - then just use the lemon juice. You have already made up your mind that it will "ruin your tomatoes" even though you have never even tried it. So even though you have no basis for that opinion, you'd likely say the same thing about citric acid if you ever got it. We can tell you till we are blue in the face that it won't but you won't agree and we just keep debating the same things over and over and over. So, since it is clear that you don't wish to add either, don't. As we have all said several times, just skip it if you want. It's your risk to take. You don't seem to be inclined to believe us that it is needed anyway. greenhouser - You are honestly making the whole process of home canning so complicated that it will never be any fun for you and that is sad because that is half the joy of doing it. Dave PS: I honestly cannot imagine how anyone could spend $300 on canning equipment even if they foolishly bought an All American pressure canner unless they have no idea how to comparison shop or are paying artificially inflated prices for things or buying equipment they really don't need. But it's your money.

Just got around to this thread again and saw Chandra's comment on the blood type book. Since I was the one who first mentioned it when someone asked if it was possible to eat too many tomatoes, thought I would throw in my two cents. I am from a cattle raising family. My 84 year old father still raises cattle and so my family eats grass-fed beef and has for over 40 years. I married a man from a hunting family and tried for a brief time to at least limit his consumption of red meat. "Three days a week is enough," I said. "No, we need it every day." he answered and meant "sometimes twice a day." So when friends loaned us the book 15 years ago, I knew I'd been beat. "See," he said, "We're supposed to eat a lot of red meat." I still insist on one chicken day a week--homegrown chickens--and one or two fish meals a week--being Norwegian, he loves Kippers and Sardines and I love Salmon having been raised near Seattle. I also make sure to fix a lot of salads and of course we do raise a BIG garden and he eats a lot more veggies now than he was raised on. I went through a period where I blood tested "allergic" to wheat so dropped it from my diet completely for 2 years--along with eggs and milk. (Hardest thing I ever did.) At the end of the two years my Dr gave me the go ahead to replace those foods carefully and I now eat all three but in much less quantity than before. Being an okie, I don't think I could give up cornbread, and especially now that George has introduced me to homegrown meal corn. (DH prefers wheat bread, both yeast raised and biscuits.) And like Chandra DH and I are blood type O so all four children are too. I have read after two or three DRs who follow the blood type system and for a while thought I would too, but just couldn't keep it up. One thing I did notice for what it is worth though. He says lentils are very bad for Os. Whether that is why I can't eat them I'm not sure. But every time I have tried, they make me feel really bad, very sluggish and sleepy and headachy. Green/raw onions do the same thing but I can't remember if they're supposed to be bad. For my family, I find it hard enough to just put a healthy diet on the table, limiting sugar, processed foods, additives etc without worrying too much about the blood type diet.

Oooh! Sweet potatoes with chipotles? That sounds interesting! I'm with you, Annie, about not adding sugar to sweet potatoes, but I have to say, really good butter all melty makes one go from garden variety tuber to amazing dessert. Tempura turnips also sounds interesting. Whenever any food is compared to another, I balk. Cauliflower is very strongly cauliflower and nothing else. I was treated to cauliflower Italian pizza crust. It tasted pretty good, especially the almost charred edges. Quality food. It had cheese but no sauce. It was fine. Really well herbed and seasoned. But it was cauliflower. And tasted like cheesy cauliflower with Italian herbs. Better than that actually, because it was dryer and had a better mouthfeel than ordinary cauliflower. So it was really good cheesy cauliflower. I don't even mind it being called cauliflower "pizza". I have a narrow definition of "pizza" (I don't think an English muffin, spaghetti sauce and cheese is pizza. A goopy cheese sandwich, but not pizza). The cauliflower pizza had enough in common with real pizza to earn the word...but only with "cauliflower" in front of it. Because it really wasn't much like pizza. Just pizza shaped and seasoned cheesy cauliflower. Cauliflower doesn't taste any more like potatoes than it does like pizza crust. Nor do parsnips. People think just because it's white, and pureed, it must taste like mashed potatoes. I say stop smoking, it interferes with your sense of taste. That's the only explanation I have for such statements. It's white and the speaker can't taste anything anyway. Mind you, I like a good parsnip puree! It's excellent with strong flavored meats like lamb and duck. But it doesn't taste anything like potatoes. I do believe that radishes could taste similar to turnips. They do have similar flavors raw. Different, but at least in the family. OTOH, I think you could make a mash out of Japanese yams that would be mashed potato-ish. Adjacent. Like radishes to turnips. Sibling resemblance, not twins. Lars, great news on the progress, especially the driving! That should make life easier for both of you.