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20 bottles of tomatoes so far, and 3 bottles of juice. The lid blew off two bottles yesterday, one while in the cooker and one while taking the bottles out. Generic new bottles with the lids they were sold with. I have four more bottles in the cooker this morning, one older bottle with an older...

This is a modular home. Somebody (probably some government bureaucrat) came up with the brilliant idea that there must be ventilation where the house meets the foundation. In certain areas that gap is as much as an inch wide. I would have to seal the whole foundation.

I think I caught the last of the house mice yesterday. The only mice I'm seeing at this point are the larger field mice. The silly things think they have squatters rights, and move in every winter. The field mice are more complicated, because they're not attracted to sugar or oils (peanut...

Tomatoes today. First batch is in the cooker.

My old house was in a dry riverbed. They had forced the creek into a culvert so they could build the subdivision. As I worked on improving the soil a lot of things started to appear from the seed bank--including a few morels! Apparently the morels can put themselves into a sort of stasis that...

I did foraged mushrooms once. Problem with foraged mushrooms is that the critters like them as much as we do so they often have bug holes. Finding enough to can is a problem so I end up eating them fresh. Such a sacrifice. :lau

In most fermentation processes the water is either drained off or used to store the product. I assumed peppers would be the same, fermented in water, then drained and the result used to make whatever. Apparently not. I don't have enough peppers left for another attempt so that will have to wait...

I did find some additional information, though. Hot sauce is fermented without water. I hadn't caught that before. The ratios are for the material (peppers) and not the water. So that suggests there is a great deal of water in peppers and the normal salt ratios wouldn't work. Most ferments you...

Kham yeast is not generally considered a bad thing. It's a wild yeast that gets into many fements and it's completely harmless. But its presence indicates that there might be imbalances in the ferment. It usually feeds on sugar (I didn't add any sugar, so obviously from the peppers) and can't...

Non-iodized table salt. For most ferments I use beween 2 and 3 T per quart. 5 t is just under 2 T. I normally make up a quart of brine and use what is necessary to cover the material. Too much salt might kill the bacteria and make the ferment fail that way, but it wouldn't make bad bacteria...

Only a canning question indirectly, as I was planning to can fermented hot sauce. Every time I try to ferment peppers they go sour. Does anyone have a process they use for fermented peppers? I used 3 T of salt in the fermentation bottle this time rather than making up a quart of brine and...

I've trapped probably 20 mice in the last week. 5 yesterday, one so far this morning. Only 1 trap, because the silly creatures actually ate the bait flapper off the other one. Why in the world would anyone make that particular piece out of plastic? I think we know... I removed their primary...

At that point some of my siblings were obsessed with a picture book called "Pickle chiffon pie" about a king who would eat nothing else.

My Dad once made Pickle Chiffon Pie for a company party. Nobody was willing to try it. Very sad. (Pistachio pudding and green food coloring in the topping. It was actually pretty good).

Yes, and yes. Have enough in the freezer for at least one batch, probably two, and I'm picking them over every morning. I choose which I want to eat that day, and everything else goes in the feezer. They're on dehydrator trays, so if one starts to leak the others aren't sitting in a puddle. I'm...

I did a batch of salsa. My sister wanted (very) mild, her husband wanted hot and neither of them likes cilantro, so I did hers with just sweet peppers, added hot peppers next, and added cilantro for my own. Some time next week I need to do a batch of tomatoes.

I'm hoping some of my trees produce next year. This year I got two peaches and a few cherries. The rest of the peaches and the apples blew off the trees. The garden should be in full production next year! Primarily sweet corn, popcorn, dry beans, green beans, tomatoes, peppers, onions, herbs...

I'm grateful that she called me. She could have just thrown out the lot and I would never have known. I've been holding on to my last bottle of tomatoes like a treasure. I got everything sorted and washed yesterday, the boxes should be dry this morning so I can get them back to her.

Happy ending! I got them! I got a call from my friend this afternoon asking me to come get them, since they were smelling up her house and her mother wasn't doing anything with them. We got all the rotten stuff sorted out and I ended up with two boxes fully ripe that I'll process in the next...

My guess is that his knees are part of the problem with the gym. That being said, there might be lots of reasons. My Dad refused to go to the gym because of all the scantilly clad ladies. He also loved swimming but he would never go for the same reason. I agree that depending on his...