Hm...not sure this stuff is going to survive long enough to be bottled. Yum.
At first I thought too much salt and too much hot pepper, but in cooking down it worked perfectly. I did double the brown sugar.
Ok. Apx 6 c cucumber, 2 T salt, 1 T pepper, 2 T brown sugar, 1 c green bell pepper, 1 c onion, 1/2 c hot peppers in vinegar so maybe a couple T vinegar. Cooking down now. Will need more vinegar likely, but I'll see. Hope it doesn't have to be pressure cooked, but I'll go by taste.
I've been using them in meals since they started to ripen. Today is cucumber, potatoes, green peppers and onions with eggs. I'm hoping to get ideas of how to preserve some of it. I have four more seed cucumbers out there.
*edited to fix a mistake. I wrote zucchini rather than cucumber
Build a recipe
My garden is running late--I had my first tomato sandwich of the season this week and I'm swimming in cucumbers.
I pulled two of my seed cucumbers today, the seeds are in a jar, but I want to do something with the full grown cucumber.
I've been doing watermelon and cantaloupe...
I don't know if it would work for everyone, but I ground up horseradish into a slurry and poured it in their holes, around plants I wanted to protect, and across the forecasted route. Usually took about a week for them to vacate for the season.
It may come down to importing native bees eventually. Ground nesting bees, mason bees. All I have seen in the last three years is carpenter bees. I've been pollinating my fruit trees with a paintbrush this year. Fine when it's a few blossoms on immature trees, but next year...
I mow around...
This area has been mowed grass for so long that both pollinators and predators are in short supply.
I need to have reliable flowers before I can expect either to return. It wouldn't be fair to bring in a beehive only to have them travel miles after the redbuds stop blooming.
I'll be planting...
With the grains and pseudo-grains I'm more thinking about winter forage for the velociraptors. Many of those plants are pretty drought tolerant, and if they can reseed themselves I can let the chickens in during the winter and lock them out in the spring so the system can recover...
I need to plant corn, finish the beans, and start on cover crops. Experimenting with pseudo-grains this year. Amaranth, quinoa, sesame and chia are in the ground.
Case in point. It was time to plant chia and I could NOT find the seeds. I had them 10 minutes ago! Finally found them, tucked down inside one of the pots I set out to plant the chia in. A logical place, since I intended to plant them. Wasted half an hour searching.
I walked into this room while initially touring the house. There was a grow light in the ceiling fixture and built-in shelves. My growers heart immediately wanted it.