Never eat anything (including cauliflower) bigger than your head...
5 years ago
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Broccoli never did anything and now has little tops forming
Comments (4)I set out my home-grown transplants about that same time and they are huge and I need to harvest some very soon. If nothing else is growing well, I would wonder about the soil and fertilazation. It really pays to set out broccoli before it gets any legginess. I set mine out about 23 days after sowing seeds indoors and the plants are a little smaller than the store boughten ones....See MoreJuly 3rd pics. I know, 2 days late, but better late than never
Comments (12)Thank you everyone. All things considered I feel pretty good for a week post op and I'm behaving quite well. doing only what I'm supposed to do. Drippy, those chipmunks are not funny and they sure aren't "chip and dale" either. Never mind the garden bed destruction that they create, the holes that they dig can be dangerous if you get your shoe or foot caught in one of them and go down. A year ago I did just that and tore ligaments in my ankle. The little boy that used to live next door got his foot in one when he was 4 and broke his leg. Now if that isn't enough insult here's more to add insult to injury. An article in the newspaper a few weeks ago said that chipmunks are a major carrier of deer tick now, more so than even deer and that could be the cause of a massive increase in the number of Lyme Disease cases being reported. Not that i needed an incentive to do everything I can to get rid of them, but that sure added a whole new layer to doing it. Then a friend called me last week the day before I went to the hospital to warn me that she was working in the gardens a month ago and she unknowingly disturbed a chipmunk that jumped on her arm and ran off. She didn't notice that she had a tick on her arm till the next day because it had attached right on top of a birthmark. 2 weeks later, bingo she has the classic bulls eye rash on her arm and has lyme disease. Chipmunks are not very smart. They can't swim, but will be more than happy to dive into water to get sunflower seeds and drown in the process and that's fine with me, right along with eating my datura as well. e-mail me if you want some info on chipmunks that like to dive for sunflower seeds. Bonny, the livingston daisy was WS by a friend of mine. There are 3 of us that share the WS for 3 gardens. We cane up with the idea to share it all after a couple of years of all of us sowing the same seeds then coming to my spring plant swap and all having the same extra seedlings. Didn't make sense so we split it up now. We end up with the same number of containers, more of each kind sowed, but the total variety is split between the homes and we end up with an even bigger variety of plants for the beds. Vera the color of that viola is beautiful. If you have any seeds for trade in the fall, I'd love some and will send you some of mine. PV, sow those seeds for next year. No matter how many of them you have, sow all of them cause they are a funny seed to germinate. My experience with them has been strange to say the least. My first seeds where from valueseeds.com. got 3 packets, 30 seeds in each packet and sowed them in early March. just sprinkled on the top of the soil cause they are small and tannish in color. Out of those 70 seeds we got 6 seedlings. Not a very happy camper that there, but I collected every single one of the seeds I could get my hands on from the plants and it was a ton of seeds, more than 1/4 tsp. Next year we sowed every one of those seeds, and I kept thinking OMG, what will I do if thousands of these seeds germinate. Well, no such luck, we got 20 seedlings last year. Figured ok, better than the year before and we will always have to sow every single seed we get. So this past year I had more than 1/2 teaspoon of seeds. We sowed 4 mushroom containers of seeds, the 10 ounce size container, put each one in a ziplock baggie and put them out in mid April this year. just an experiment to see if a later sowing would make any difference in the germination rate. They began to germinate on 4/29 the exact same day as the prior to years, and they where slow. But this year we saw how the seeds germinate. they swell to at least twice their original size and all but germinate 1 seed at a time. honest. But there was a huge difference in this years germination. We had mushroom containers totally covered in seedlings. so many that we couldn't separate seedlings and planted hunks of them every where. My neighbor across the street still hasn't planted hers out yet and the entire container is covered in flowers and seedlings covering the container. We have to have thousands of seedlings this year. On top of that, we have seedlings of the viola popping up all over the place in the lawn and my neighbor has several popping up in her yard as well. Doesn't make any sense to me why on the third year with the seeds, second year of collecting seeds we have mass germination and the prior 2 years including the first year from commercial purchase the germination was very poor. Fran...See MoreAny advice for a person who has never canned anything before?
Comments (26)Carol, It is fairly hot, although the heat is moderated by the fact that so much of it is sweet peppers. It isn't so hot that I cannot eat it and I am a medium-hot pepper eater. I don't care for eating something like habaneros straight off the vine, though I love them in Habanero Gold. Much depends on how hot your hot peppers are. I grow a blend of jalapenos that have Scoville Heat Unit Ratings ranging from 2,000 or 3,000 SHU to 8,000 to 10,000 SHU. I can regulate, to some extent, how hot the pepper relish is just by choosing jalapenos with a higher or SHU rating. (Clearly this means that when I harvest, I have to harvest each variety separately, and it also explains why I label each and every jalapeno pepper plant.) Also, in a very hot and dry summer, you know, the heat can be much more intense in hot peppers. So, if you are trying to keep your pepper relish a little less hot, use peppers grown either in a cooler, milder summer or use the ones from the first harvest of the season. The jalapenos from my first harvest of any given year, which usually occurs soon after about June 10-15, usually are not as hot as the ones I harvest in July or August, since they formed, grew and matured in generally wetter, cooler weather. If I wanted to make a milder hot pepper relish, I'd use those....even if I had to chop them up and freeze them and wait for enough sweet bells to be ripe. Tim, for the record, generally doesn't think any pepper or pepper product is too hot, except for raw habaneros. I did make a triple-hot Habanero Gold pepper version once that is too hot for him and almost everyone else who tries it. A co-worker of his who is from a Caribbean nation where they love lots of hot, hot, hot stuff did think the Triple X Habanero Gold was wonderful, as did her son. Remember that all peppers are interchangeable in tested canning recipes that include peppers since they fall in a similar pH range so you could replace some of the hot peppers with an equivalent amount of sweet ones to reduce the heat. Because Pepper Relish requires 10 cups of peppers per batch, to me it seems like the perfect end-of-the-garden-season recipe. During the peak harvest/canning season in summer, I am using lots of peppers while making Annie's Salsa, Jalapeno Rings and Candied Jalapenos. So, in order to have enough peppers to make those routinely every week or so, I'd rather wait and make Jalapeno Relish at the end of the summer because that's normally when I have a huge bunch of sweet peppers available---when I strip the plants right before the first killing freeze. Last year I made a list of what I wanted to can. It included Annie's Salsa (needed to make at least 50 jars), Candied Jalapenos (needed to make at least 100 jars), and Zesty Bread and Butter Pickles (needed to make at least 100 jars). I achieved those goals, but most of those were given away as gifts, so in order to make me happy this year, I need to can twice as much. I also canned oodles of dill pickles as spears and slices, regular bread and butter pickles, sweet pickle relish and dill pepper relish. After all that, and with jars of canned goods hidden in every nook and cranny of the house, the last thing I needed to do was to make 5 batches of Pepper Relish......but you've got to use the harvest you produced, so I did. Someday Tim will retire and won't be carrying boxes and boxes of gift bags to work every Christmas, and I'll be able to can 25% of what I can now and it will be plenty. I think of our pantry as an endless pantry or a bottomless pantry because even when I think we've used up all Blueberry-Lime Jam, or Annie's Salsa, or Candied Jalapenos or whatever else, if I get in there and look long enough, I'll find some jars of what I need. We rarely run completely out of one item before I'm canning more of it. Still, I need a bigger pantry so I can store it all together. Lots of the stuff goes into plastic underbed storage boxes with snap-on lids. Those are the ones I pull out and carry downstairs when it is time to put together the gift bags. So, the holiday season doesn't empty out my regular pantry as much as I think it will---it just depletes my overflow storage area. I do go in and remove everything from the pantry and reorganize it once harvest time is approaching, so that the oldest canned food is moved to the front of the pantry where it will be used first. I also put the date on each jar so I know which jars are the older ones. Carson'smimi, Well, of course, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. Sounds to me like one girl needs to eat some Habanero Gold and cream cheese on crackers. I keep the Mrs. Wage's mix in the fridge too for a few days in between batches. I usually put it in plastic Ball Freezer Jam/Jelly Jars so my family knows what it is and leaves it alone. Moni, Yes, you use the lid wand with a magnet on the end of it to lift the lids out of the hot water and put them on top of the jars. I have three of them from various kits bought over the years. After we moved here, we stuck the box of canning stuff (unintentionally) up in the attic and then I had to buy a whole new set of canning utensils in order to can that year. When we got the Christmas decorations down out of the attic, we found the old canning utensils, so I had two sets. The one from the late 1980s or early 1990s is a sort of turquoise blue, the one from the late 1990s is red, and the third one (I don't remember why I bought it---or maybe it was a gift) is dark blue. My favorite one is the older one because the magnet in that set is super-strong. I need for us to add on a big canning pantry off the laundry room so I can store all my canning items together, along with all the canned goods. Unfortunately, our list of things 'to do' to the house is long and we are really slow about getting around to doing them. By the time we finally get around to adding a canning pantry, Tim will be retired and I'll be canning a lot less since he won't be sharing canned goods with all his coworkers after he retires, and we won't need a big canning pantry. The empty canning jars do pile up and I store them in the same underbed storage boxes after they have been emptied out at Christmas time. Sometimes I store the empty jars in Rubbermaid storage containers in the tornado shelter or in the garage....just wherever I can find a place to stash them. I also have 10 or 12 cases of jelly jars (new and unopened) stacked up in the guest room closet. There's barely a room in this house that doesn't have canning stuff stashed away in every spare corner of a closet, cabinet or shelf. Whenever I see canning supplies on clearance (and sometimes they pop up at odd times---like mixed in with Christmas clearance), I grab them. It is amazing how they'll discount last year's jars or lids merely because the new supply has arrived. MRS'S WAGES MIX ALERT: Yesterday I checked the canning aisle at our local Wal-Mart. They had just put out all the Mrs. Wage's Mixes. They had several kinds for pickles (but not the Zesty Bread and Butter Pickles), salsa, and spiced peaches, as well as pickling salt, pickling lime, pectin, etc. NEWBIE ALERT: If you've never canned before and you need canning salt, you will get a larger amount for a lower price if you buy it on the spice/baking aisle and not the canning aisle. It is the same canning salt, just from a different manufacturer. And, if you're going to make pickles, it is cheaper to buy your spices in bulk from someone like Pendery's instead of buying the pickling spice blend or Mrs. Wage's mixes. Sometimes in a big pickle year I do that. The best time to buy anything I need for canning is in spring because by summer, the stores stay sold out of almost everything. Now that we've discussed pickling and canning so much, I need to go back and look at my grow list, and make sure I included enough of the tomatoes and peppers needed to make lots of what we can every year on top of having all those veggies to eat fresh too. Dawn...See MoreEat your veggies!
Comments (31)Another vote for kale chips. You won't believe how good they are. I mean, you won't think they're potato chips, but they are crunchy and chip-like, not veggie-like. I made them for the first time about a year ago and my youngest, age 11, asks me to make them all the time! I had contractors here once when I made them and they saw me taking them out of the oven, so I had them try them, too, and they loved them. A funny story about brussels sprouts. My DD went on a field trip to a farm w/ her class and they were served brussels sprouts with one of the meals. The kids all loved them! I think they were roasted. About a week later, the chef at school made them for lunch the same way -- no one ate them. Guess some vegetables are destined to be eaten only in certain settings. ;)...See More- 5 years ago
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