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You can do it! When you begin the first time, I suggest that you write down how long it takes to prepare the product for each step of the canning process. I say that because it will help you determine how many canner loads you will want to do in a particular day. It sounds trivial, but it is...

I wonder if grapes are like what I read about corn in that they are sweeter if you pick them in the morning before the sugars turn to starch in the heat of the day. I also have grapes and I am delighted that they are coming in with a second crop for this year. I didn't expect that.

I'm in Zone 8a and I'm planting vates collards. This week I'm going to try to get some broccoli plants and cauliflower plants for our fall garden.

Should they be hard and brittle brown? What happens if you pick the pods that have gotten "wilty" feeling but are not brittle but you can feel a large seed in there? Are they still viable seeds if allowed to dry for a few weeks in a container? Can green pods be picked and allowed to dry some...

Hey! They look like the sustainable development pods the UN prepared!

I would defniitely feed it green grass clippings and blend them into the pile. I have found exactly the same situation with mine before. It would change if you kept turning it without adding the clippings, but the nitrogen in those clippings is exactly what's needed for the microbes to really go...

That's funny, but true! I too, love hearing the "pops"! It makes you go Ahhhh! Finished.

I too, had the stringy green beans my first year and I was really dissappointed. I was crushed! They were impossible to chew up! How could something I worked on so hard be so bad? After that experience, I searched all the catalogs that I thought were from good caretakers of the earth, and found...

I just planted several hundred Vates headless collard seeds in two flats so hopefully I will get a jump on the fall crop. Last year I had to wait so long for the feed-n-seed store to get their young plants in. I thought I'd try it myself this year. I would eventually like to be able to have...

I just did a blog post showing what I've done to use some of my weekly harvest. I like canning because I don't have to worry about losing power with a freezer. Although I must admit, sometimes I do wish I had a nice freezer. If you would like to check out what I do with my produce, have a look...

Well it's nice to see that I'm not alone in the "I love canning" department! People think I went overboard on canning my stringless green beans as I have already canned 94 quarts of them. But break it down into usage: 1 quart a week means you need 52 quarts. We love the green beans, so with the...

I have a basic tomato soup recipe from my mom and I canned it last year and it did fine. Remember, the tomato types are variable. Just keep the total quantities approximately the same for it to turn out good. Actually, with these ingredients, you can have a wide variety of combinations to suite...

I bought three Cherokee Purple plants from the feed-n-seed because they were the last ones and I have heard so much about them. They were planted later than all the rest of my tomatoes, but are now 24 inches tall and flowering. I hope they do well. That spaghetti sauce sounds interesting!

I planted an 8 foot long row of Petaluma gold rush beans on April 12th, 2011. I have what seems like hundreds of feet of vines, but no evidence of even the first bean showing. Nothing but vines. I fertilized them once with an organic low nitrogen fertilizer when they were planted 114 days ago! I...

Great job! What a productive way to spend some time! Isn't it fun? I love adding to my food supply that doesn't need refrigeration.

I apparently have chokecherry bushes in my yard by the fence. I was going to pull them out, but before that I am trying to find out if the berries can be used for anything good to eat. If I allow the bushes to continue to grow, will I regret it? Are they a problem bush? They seem to be getting...

If the vines are good and green, I would wait them out. Don't give them anymore fertilizer under any circumstances, and I would keep them well-watered. I feel like at some point they will start to bear and then you'll be swimming in beans... I hope. On April 30th, I planted six "double" 20'...

While I'm not sure how long the allelopaths hang around in the soil, if I were in your situation, I would get as many neutral leaves as I could and shred them then till them into the soil 2 or 3 times before winter this year. I would also try to get as many lawn clippings as I could, spread them...

One of the main reasons that I'm so into composting is that I read that if you distribute six 5 gallon buckets of cured compost in each 100 square feet of garden space, you don't have to rotate your crops because of the beneficial micro-organisms taking care of things in the soil that can...

My mother and grandmother both used compost piles for their gardens, so how could I not do the same? Although I live in a large metropolitan area, I manage to have a tremendous compost "facility". A compost tumbler just wouldn't work for me, so I constructed my own area. Initially, I turned...