Bonnie, I bought a big box of pickle cucumbers from the farmer's market and the pickling mix at Walmart for dill pickles. It has no yucky additives listed. I did add fresh dill though and to one batch I added a chopped jalapeno for some spice and it was good. Maybe try a batch of freezer jam first before canning? My grapes are ripe for pickin, so are the tomatoes, pumpkins, herbs, lots of strawberries. Now I need to get busy and start canning. I'm going to try the tomato sauce recipe someone posted from the harvest forum and also the recipe out of the book that has cinnamon and nutmeg which sounds different and yummy. So far I've only read canning recipes that call for tomato sauce or puree to begin with. How do I make the raw tomatoes into sauce or puree? Slip the skins like Cnetter mentioned? How? Maybe I should invest in a hand crank mill like David--are they expensive? All of my grapes have seeds and maybe I could use it for that too? Any advice is appreciated :) I liked the homemade ketchup idea. Most of the ketchup sold is full of sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Heinz makes organic now that is just sugar instead of HFCS. How else would we get kids to eat most anything?! Peppers...we've eaten most of the sweet ones and have some orange ones just about ready and are they good! *Italian Roasters--I bought as transplants and the tag only says 'Italian Roasters" describing them as mild & pungent and they are not mild! I had a small get together where everyone brought their own meat to barbecue and we provided all the side dishes from the garden. I sliced and grilled only one of the roasters with a bunch of other veggies from the garden and all of our guests were on fire including my husband who loves anything as hot as possible. The jalapenos are milder. Maybe they were misnamed? I don't know what to do with them and about 20 of them. *Red cherry bomb peppers- best for salsa? *Lotsa jalapenos-I'd like to make jelly Cnetter I have crabapples too. Next year I'll try some jelly with 'em! Plum Jelly--gotta a good recipe David? A friend called and says they have hundreds ripe and falling of their tree and to come pick em. I need to turn down any request for a social life during the month of September!

Josh, I do have some Japanese Painted Ferns but what is shown is varagated Packasandra. Started with a few plants that take off from stem cuttings in the early spring. Now I have hundreds used as a border. Behind them Hosta Gold Standard and various common ones. Under a seedling Japanese maple tree. There is some mix-mash of wild ferns from our woods. Also a few jack'n the pulpit just for fun. Wait, in the first picture is a Japanese painted fern. You are right my friend.

In grade 11, on the first day of history class the teacher asked us to think if we had done something in our lives that we regret. After that pause he talked about regret, and to live each day of your life deliberately so that in 30, 40, 50 years we could still be happy with the answer to the question. The answer didnt have to be that you have nothing to regret, if you have nothing to regret does might that mean you didnt try enough, push hard enough, risk failure often enough. Just understand the choices you have made to those regrets. I have thought on those words, that day many times. I would never have smoked. I dont smoke now, I never smoked much, I havent smoked for 18 years or so, but I would never have done so. I would have had more sexual partners before getting married. This is something I cant really do anything about and still honor my marriage vows, but I really regret this. One of my sons was critically ill when he was a toddler, I wish I had been a different person through that experience. I had to dig deep inside myself to be very strong, to fight for him, to push through that, but i feel that it left me harder than I was beforehand. I miss that carefree person, I miss how easily she laughed.

Okay I am truly crazy. I just ordered the V8 Absolute so I’d have the hard floor attachment. I’ll keep that one at home where I have the new wood floors and bring the V8 Animal to the lake where I don’t have as much wood and it’s 18 years old. I’m not at all a shopping nut but I’m glad this thing will arrive when DH is out of town and I can squirrel it away before he sees it. Otherwise he might think I’ve gone off the deep end - have hardly vacuumed in 20+ years and suddenly I buy two vacuums in less than a month. Being of a frugal nature I tell myself they‘ll pay for themselves after a couple months without a housecleaner. People ask me what I do now that I’m retired - oh, I buy vacuum cleaners and vacuum every day - well not every day but often.