2019 Garden

IceNEyes1986 wrote:

Question. What kind of things do YOU make with hot peppers?

I lacto ferment 90% of the peppers I grow. I either grind and mash the peppers, mix with 3.2% salt by pepper weight, then put the mash in a ventable jar to ferment for 30+ days. Or, I brine them in a 3.5% salt water solution for 30+ days. It takes a bit of attention to mix and stir based on each brew’s schedule, but the results are always worth it. The key is good salt, Diamond Crystal Kosher is highly recommended.

IceNEyes1986 wrote:

What kind of things do YOU make with hot peppers?

I’ve had one year where the peppers (Jalapenos) went crazy, we kept Pico on hand in the fridge, had poppers fairly regularily, and then made the rest into hot sauce or froze them whole I believe.

Great replies guys! We eat poppers once in a while, so that’s covered. Did’t think about drying them out and crushing them to use later or making the hot sauce. Both great options! Thanks!

______________ wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>1hl&sinker wrote:</div>
Riddle me this. My favorite pasta tomato plant, polish linguisa, started of with something that is not then the rest of the plant seems to be producing what it is supposed to do. Pictures hopefully describe the situation.

The first couple fruits are akin to double-wide mobile homes. I grow Marzanos, and one out of every dozen plants tends to put out double-wide fruit like that now and again. My guess, you’ll see a couple more.

Hit the nail on the head fishwater. One was an early ripened and the inerds were just like a polish linguisa. As it looked ripe as you can see inside not quite.
Try this variety out their delicious and great for canning and everything else.
The green one is more like normal with the same innards of almost all flesh and few seeds.

Another oddity, Anihime Pepper gone wild. Curious how this unfolds.

This tomato maybe the biggest one for me.

One more thing all my blossoms have dropped. Thinking heat and humidity done them in. Will I get more blossoms this late that will generate ripe tomatoes? The polish linguisa go up into frost so I’m hopeful for them.

Just pulled my onions from the garden. UFFDA!!! do I got onions.

Seems to happen to me every year. I’ve been picking 5 quart buckets of beans every three days lately. I picked about twenty huge green peppers tonight and noticed that I’ll be picking maybe 7 or 8 gallons of tomatoes on Friday so I’ll be making spaghetti sauce again and likely get 6 more quarts canned. Plus I’ll get another batch of bruschetta out of the picking too.

I have a half dozen tomato plants that are about 7 foot tall and the tops are covered in nice tomatoes that are still green so we’ll have love apples for a while yet. I picked an Heirloom Box Car Willie tonight that weighs about three pounds and there’s a ton more on that plant. The “pinks” are just going nuts. Ma told me I over did it again in spite of actually cutting back on plants this year, by three plants to 24.

The carrots are still growing hard so I’ll leave them until frost for some sweetness. The onions needed more heat but there are a lot of medium sized ones that I’ll likely use up in spaghetti sauce.

Every year this happens but this year the late stuff is really kicking out quantity so I can’t complain. That spaghetti sauce sure tasted good about late January or February. And those carrots sure add to a nice venison roast along about the same time. We’ve got a mess of corn and beans froze now and will continue with that until they quit, so starvation is not looking like a happening thing again this winter. Now I need to find a pig or two to practice my butchering skills on.

Glad to hear yours is doing good Tom I’m filling crop failure on mine!:???: I won’t be canning any tomatoes this year. I’m getting an ok supply of cukes. Pulled my onions a while ago. Carrots are good, kalarabi are worst I’ve seen in years. Peppers s stink to.

I plucked another 5 gallons of tomatoes this morning and here they are this afternoon…..

I’ll get about another 4 nice quarts of spaghetti sauce from this batch.

PS: got 5 quarts.

There’s that sauce I’ve heard so much about! Think your stock pot looks similar to mine as well. 5 qt, nicely done!

That’s an 8 quart pot. When I started the tomatoes were right to the lip of the pot after adding the onions, garlic and seasonings. The seasonings incidentally, for this pot full are as follows:

2 large yellow onions chopped coarsely,
5 large garlic cloves, peeled and chopped coarse,
1/3 cup of sugar,
1 tablespoon of seasoned salt, and 1/8 cup each of dried basil, oregano and marjoram

I simmer this in the rough until the onions are transparent then run the sauce thru a food processor on puree. Each processor batch is pressed thru a fine sieve with a rubber spatula into a large bowl. Or two very large ones in this batch’s case. When the last of the veggies are pureed I scrub out the pot and re-fill it with the puree, and using an anti-spatter screen cover the pot, I get the sauce back to a hearty simmer for an hour or so until the contents are about at the handle’s rivets as seen here. Then I add 1/3 cup of cold water with three very generous heaping tablespoonsful of corn starch, well shaken. The sauce gets to simmer another 15 minutes but has to be watched carefully and kept stirred well using a whisk. When I am ready to do the jars I turn the heat down to a mere simmer. I fill the jars while the sauce is slightly boiling and seal quick, then invert the jars on a towel on the table. They sit this way for 15 minutes, then get set right side up. Within a minute the lids snap down. That’s it. Let’m cool. I leave them on the table a couple days to be certain the lids take then store them in an absolute dark environment. Lids get the date and batch number with magic marker before going in the dark spot. Sure good eating come January.

Tom Sawvell wrote:

That’s an 8 quart pot.

That looks like a Calphalon Contemporary 8 qt Stock pot.

Your recipe is near the same to mine. I simmer for hours to reduce and add a bit of citric to taste.
The processing is where we are completely different. I either pressure can or hot water bath mine.

Been doing mine like this for years. Tomatoes have tons of acid in them. The little bit of salt in addition to the tomatoes does just fine for me. Now regular canned tomatoes I hot water bath.

I just blanched another 5 quarts of beans. No end in sight for those yet.

We are harvesting the garden carrots today! At first it didn’t seem like we got as many as last year, but I checked my notes and we actually packaged two more bags than last year. Yay!

Sharon, in your vast knowledge, Why do carrots in the home garden produce fat top roots and then are short?

This is not a comment about your harvest please understand. Yours appear to be about 1.25 to 1.5″ at the top, then taper to 0″ in 5″. I’ve had the same issue as well as no diameter with some length.

I guess I’m asking what is the proper soil and seed to raise blue ribbon carrots? I’m look’in for an education to be a blue ribbon master gardener.

Tom Sawvell wrote:

I plucked another 5 gallons of tomatoes this morning and here they are this afternoon…..

I’ll get about another 4 nice quarts of spaghetti sauce from this batch.

PS: got 5 quarts.

Tom, do you see the ratio of a gallon bucket of ripe tomatoes will yield a quart of finished sauce?

I can look at a bowl of ripe maders and see the amount of qt canned but, I haven’t made sauce near as much to get the common sense handle on the harvest to finished product when it comes to swause.

I can pretty much bank on 5 quarts, plus enough to do up some spaghetti for a light lunch, for every 5 gallons of tomatoes. A lot will depend on the type of tomato too. Mariannas are a larger-than Roma Italian variety that will yield a lot of sauce with little in the line of seeds, BUT they can be a bear to peel even when red ripe and blanched well. My Mariannas all came in ripe at once this fall and lots ripened so fast they started spoiling after a couple days in good sun. The Super Beef variety I planted 12 plants of this year are what’s fueling the tomato sauce operation here. These are really nice tomatoes that can weigh a couple pounds each and have slightly small seed cores, plus they blanch and peel real well.

I keep all of the heirloom varieties for table slicing because they tend to be really wet and have seed cores up the gazoo. Heirlooms are much sweeter eating too…..but you know that, eh? lol

Funny thing about tomatoes though…..when I was a kid I wouldn’t touch one let alone eat one. Then in my senior year that all changed. Never could figure out what turned the table but for years I turned my nose up at anything tomato, including spaghetti sauce.

Denny, we’ve had some years where the carrots are slimmer and longer (more like traditional grocery store carrots), and them sometimes we pull them up like this. I’m not sure if it’s the type of carrot, seed brand, soil density, or thinning commitment, or perhaps a combo of all these that makes the difference. If I find out I’ll let you know! I do prefer the slimmer, longer carrots as they’re easier to chop for blanching since they’re more uniformly shaped.