Hi All! Not sure if anyone is still out there connected to this thread, but thought I would try. =) My family loves the good old Strawberry Rhubarb freezer jam that uses jello, I love it, too. My problem is, I try to make enough of it to last us all year (they love it that much!), but I dont' want to use that much freezer space. I have tried a couple of recipes this year, water bath recipes, that have not set up. One I was afraid may not have had the right ingredients to be a jar jam, since it didn't set up, so after a few hours, I threw it in the fridge to use as syrup. Low and behold it set. =) So, I found another and tried it. It didn't set either. (What is the longest it should take to set up?) 12 c rhubarb 3 Tbs pectin (powdered) 3 c sugar lime juice cubes (2 or 3?) dash red food color Put sugar on diced rhubarb and let it sit overnight to suck water out. Cooked and reduced it for about 15 miutes with lime juice, and added pectin near end. My recipe is homemade so your mileage may vary. Rhubarb is high acid, though, so it should be safe enough. >>> I like the look of the above recipe very much (it is from further up in this thread), it has very little sugar, doesn't require much in the way of other fruit (I'm trying to be as frugal as possible) and is said to set up. My question is this. Can I use one of my recipes that has not set up, just add commercial pectin to it? (I do like the flavor, just want it to set.) If so, how do I figure out how much pectin to add? I'm new to the jam canning process, and don't have much for local resouces, so I appreciate all the help I can get. Thanks! Gabi

With cuttings, anything can go wrong, but I would focus on hydration/heat, first, then the mix you're using second. On a 95F day, plants can dry out very fast. A small cutting can't pull water fast enough from the soil to keep up. You also have to be careful about transplanting them into a mix that's too hot. I normally pot up in pro-mix, which has zero fertilizer, and use a very weak solution of Miracle Gro to feed them for a month or two. With a small cutting, too much fertilizer (organic included) can cook them.

From a grocer I got about 2 shopping bags full of rotten grapes. I removed them from the stem and put the grapes in ziplocks. Since I've got no more space in my freezer, I just put them in the garage and that was about 3 weeks ago. I still have about 4 bags ziplocks left. They're moldy and fermenting. Before feeding the grapes to the worms, I sqeezed out the juice (goes to my potted plants) and let it air for a while. I feed my FT 1 small ziplock at a time and so far it's OK. And yes, I put lots of shredded newspaper around it. helencolby: you're right about the gluttons. With the rotten grapes, I also got one (rotten) of those oversized grapefruits (but this kind tasts bitter). I cut it in half and after 10 days, both halves were full with worms, just worms, no VC. The worms are happy, I am too, LOL.

Ah...mangoes! Mine just love to clean off the pits (seed). They do a good job too. As with the citrus peels, too many can alter the ph within, and like Bill says, they take longer for the decomposers to break down and make suitable for the worms. I can tell with my bin when they need more delicious scraps, all the little white guys (shrimp tail or something like that - they have legs, are white, ovalish and very small) are working over the newsprint, when there is still food, most of them are partyin' on that instead. My bin is still small, so I collect little bits of everything for my worms from my compost bucket, just to give them a varied diet. So it's like: a bit of the bottoms of the asparagus, some lettuce, the smelly alfalfa sprouts that didn't make it into dh's sandwich, chunk of nana peel, red pepper stem and hat, chunk of onion (cleans the blood!) etc. I keep my servings small, and weekly. When I have more room I plan to buy another bin, seed with half of my little one hidden in the kitchen pantry (that dh does not know about) and really go to town on this. As for toxins, I think I read somewhere else here that experiments have shown that the red wrigglers will process pig manure and their castings show no trace of bugs? Or maybe it was cow manure (e-coli) or chicken manure (salmonella). Sorry to not remember the whole deal,but the idea sounds promising - considering that lettuce and spinach have been pulled from previous shelves because of this problem. I will have to look that up again, but it seems they are nature's little "cleaners". ~kioni~