Organic Weed Control Class Notes

When Ben Franklin said, “Nothing is certain except for death and taxes,” he revealed that he was not a gardener. Gardeners know that weeds should be added to that list.

Sadly, there is no magic bullet.  There is not a product alive that does what Roundup promises.  Not even Roundup does what Roundup promises.  So, unless you want to pave your entire yard, you will have to deal with weeds. 

First, Know Thy Enemy:  what kind of weed are you dealing with?  This will dictate how you will control them. 

Types of weeds:

v  Annuals ~ Weeds that complete their entire life cycle in one season. Easiest to get rid of physically, but quickest to reseed.  Examples: Cleavers, Chickweed, Henbit, Hedge Parsley (Torilis), Annual bluegrass,

v  Biennials ~ Plants that complete their life cycle in two years. Easier than perennials to get rid of, but harder than annuals. Examples: Wild carrot and it's incredibly toxic lookalike Poison Hemlock.  (Note: LEARN about poison hemlock, then always use gloves when eradicating it. It really IS as toxic as they say.)

v  Perennials ~ Weeds that live for years, going dormant in winter (usually) and sprouting again to grow in spring/summer/fall.  This includes many types including creeping, rhizomatous, and bulbous.  Examples: Bermuda grass, Nut grass (Nutsedge), Sheep Sorrel, Johnson grass, Dallisgrass, and Crabgrass.

Basic ways to control weeds:

v  Annuals ~ Cut them off at ground level or just below the soil surface.  Don’t let them go to seed.

v  Biennials ~ Same as annual control when they’re young, more like perennial control when they’re older.

v  Perennials ~ Dig them out, sheet mulch, repeated vinegar/orange oil sprayings, repeated pruning to ground.

Some Tips

v  First, avoid weeds.  One year of seeds means seven years of weeds, so don’t let any go to seed if they get away from you. 

v  Don’t put those that have gone to seed in the compost pile or they will come back to haunt you.

v  Increasing soil fertility and organic matter content discourages many weeds. 

v  Damp soil is easier to pull weeds from.  Not wet – you never want to work wet soil as it can cause clods that take forever to “melt”.  And not dry – dry soil can be rock hard, and harder to pull weed roots from. 

Ways to control weeds:

About weed barrier fabric – I’m not a big fan.  It stops natural cycles (leaves falling on soil and breaking down, and soil moisture level fluctuations) and many times don’t work anyway, leaving a mess of plastic threads you have to pull up (which isn’t always easy if Bermuda has clambered across it and pinned it to the ground).  If you do use it, try to use a thick paper one so it will eventually break down and not leave you with that mess to clean up.  In extreme circumstances, when sheet mulching hasn’t worked, use heavy black contractor’s plastic covered with mulch, then pull up in a year or two. 

In the lawn:

v  Keep the grass as healthy as you can so it can choke out most weeds (Refer to our Organic Lawn Care Guide).  Also, increasing soil fertility and organic matter content discourages many weeds while encouraging turf grass. 

v  Corn gluten – A pre-emergent weed killer used at least twice a year just before the two main weed-sprouting times: at the change of cool weather to warm weather and warm back to cool. (Refer to our Corn Gluten handout)

v  Hand digging/hand removal – There are a number of hand tools that will help you with this.  Check into Cobra tool, hori hori knife, Cape Cod weeder, rockery trowel, radius weeder, ball weeder, cork screw weeding tool, daisy grubber, Ho-Mi (Korean EZ-Digger). You can also use a knife or screwdriver for some things, and a regular dinner fork and/or longer-handled barbecue fork.

v  Weed popper for clumping weeds and those with large taproot systems.

v  In extreme cases, use a spading fork to loosen the area in and around the weeds, pull them up roots and all, then carefully replace the grass.  Care will need to be taken for the grass after this as you’ve effectively just transplanted it.  Seaweed and extra watering will be needed.

In planted beds:

v  Mulching – A good, thick layer of mulch will shade out most weed seeds and make any others easier to pull since they won’t be as well-rooted.

v  Hoes – stirrup hoe (aka oscillating hoe) is my favorite.

v  20% Vinegar – This extra-strong vinegar can be sprayed as is, or mixed with orange oil and soap (See the Poison Ivy Killer recipe on NaturalGardenerAustin.com). 

v  In extreme cases, use a spading fork to loosen the area in and around the weeds, pull them up roots and all, then carefully replace the grass.  Care will need to be taken to avoid roots of established plants if possible.  If not, seaweed will help them get over it.

In veggie beds:

v  Intensive planting – Planting crops so close together that they act as a living mulch.

v  No-Till, or minimizing soil disturbance – Some weed seeds can lay dormant for decades and only need the briefest light exposure to germinate, so tilling actually increases weed seed germination.  It’s best to avoid if you can. 

v  Cover cropping – Cover crops shade out the newly sprouted weeds and add organic matter to the soil, increasing its organic matter content and nitrogen content (when using legumes as a cover crop), discouraging weeds in the process.  Cool season cover crops good for our area are crimson clover, Australian winter pea, elbon rye, perennial rye, and annual rye.  Warm season cover crops are buckwheat and cowpeas (black eyed peas, purple hull peas, cream peas). 

v  In extreme cases, use a spading fork to loosen the area in and around the weeds, pull them up roots and all, then carefully replace the grass.  Care will need to be taken to avoid roots of established plants if possible.  If not, seaweed will help them get over it.

In new areas that will be planted beds or veggie beds or lawn:

v  Sheet mulching – Multiple layers of compost-newspaper-cardboard to shade out and rot weeds below.  It must be left in place for at least two seasons before planting through it, longer for certain hard-to-kill weeds.

v  Pre-Sprouting – Watering the area to encourage weed seeds to sprout, then tilling again or using a hoe to kill them while they’re still small.  You can do this for a month, hoeing once or more a week, and you will presprout and kill 90% of the weed seeds. 

Tom's Double Digging Class

At the double digging class last Saturday, Tom gave a link to the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California Santa Cruz.  I tried it, but it didn't come up for me.  I did a search for the center under it's full name and got this link:

Center for Agroecology

And here is the section he said to look at specifically:

Garden and Field Tillage and Cultivation

We'll be giving this class again in late spring or early summer, when we resume classes in May.  Keep an eye on the events calendar at the Natural Gardener website.  We'll post dates and times there.

Veggie Gardening 201 Class Notes

Got a year or two of veggie growing experience under your belt and now looking for a bit more of a challenge?  Come to one of my Vegetable Gardening 201 classes at The Natural Gardener.  These are the class notes, so if you need a hard copy to bring to class with you, copy the individual url to this blog post and go to PrintFriendly.com.

Veggie Gardening 201

Timing:  You already know planting times in Texas are different than the rest of the country.  But did you know you can tweak them even more?  Gambling a bit by planting things even earlier than the calendar says can really pay off.  We do it here at The Natural Gardener occasionally, I do it at home, and many market growers do it regularly.  But remember that sometimes, when there's a HARD frost later in the season or a week of 100+ temps later than you think, it's a complete bust.  

Season Extenders: Things to either warm up or cool down vegetable plants.

Frost Cloth – The one you may have already been using.

Shade Cloth – You may have already been using this as well.

Candle Warmers – Prayer candles in glass, buried partway and lit with a pot over it.

Christmas Lights (incandescent) – C7 or C9 type.

Cold Frames – “Mini greenhouses.”  Usually covered with glass, but sometimes row cover or plastic (sheeting or corrugated plastic panels).

Plastic Sheeting – Be sure to get UV resistant.  

Greenhouses - Traditional greenhouses aren't usually financially viable and certainly not needed

Lettuce and kale will wane and the tomatoes
will mature and take their place.

Interplanting: Planting two or more crops in the same area, close to and among each other.  Sometimes they can grow in the same season compatibly, other times one crop will wane as the other matures.  Some examples…

Sweet potatoes under peppers

Cole crops under tomatoes

Creeping herbs under other things

Strawberries under asparagus

Okra with artichokes    

Crop Rotation: Rotating planting spots around the garden each season so no type of vegetable is planted in the same spot two years in a row. 

To avoid disease buildup and mineral deficiencies over time

Vegetable Families

Cover Cropping: Growing plants for the express purpose of improving the soil.  They can be tilled into the soil when they are a few weeks or months old, or allowed to die and decompose in place naturally.  If tilled in, allow at least two weeks for decomposition before replanting the bed.

Warm season:

Cowpeas – This one’s a legume, so fixes nitrogen. 

Buckwheat

Cool season:

Annual Rye

Perennial Rye

Crimson Clover – Another legume.

Australian Winter Pea – Another legume.

Hairy Vetch – Still another legume. 

Record Keeping is an important way of not losing what you've learned.  There are numerous ways to do it.  Pick one that works for you.  Some I've used are:  

Photos saved on your phone or computer in dated folders.

Good old fashioned paper and pen
Blog - combines photos and text, and it's fun!  

Using "cues" in photos: I planted THESE .....   THIS WAY ........................................... in THIS BED.  

Fertilizing and Soil Life

How pH affects nutrient availability.

Desertification - how the summer heat and dryness affects our garden and what to do about it.

Alkalinity and how it affects soil chemistry, making some nutrients unavailable. The average soil pH in our area that I see on customer's soil tests over and over again is 7.8.

Nutrient/Mineral Deficiencies: The most common we encounter are:

Nitrogen - Pale, stunted, yellow plant.  Fertilize with a food with a high first number.

Iron - Yellow leaves with bright green veins. Give Seaweed with iron or Copperas.

Magnesium – Yellow “halo-ed” edges on leaves (width dependent on plant and severity), green centers.

NOTE: If you attempt to correct the deficiency (for instance add Epsom salt for magnesium deficiency) and there is no change after two weeks, you can suspect a different deficiency or other cause as many things look alike.  For instance, these photos all depict iron deficiency:

And this is magnesium deficiency:

And these deficiencies are, from left, potassium, boron, and nitrogen.

Planting by the Phases of the Moon

Waxing (growing) moon: Time to sow and transplant things that grow above ground.

Waning (declining) moon: Time to sow and transplant things that grow below ground.

New moon: "Dark of the moon". Dormant period. Kill pests and weeds, turn soil.

Garden Experiments: You can learn a lot by experimenting with different products, methods, or varieties.  Be sure to do them side-by-side in the same year to evaluate them fairly.  If you simply try something one year and something else the next, there may be variables you don't notice that unfairly affect one or the other.  For instance, if you use one fertilizer in a year that is mild, then another in a year that got extra hot extra early, any negative effects are likely because of the differences in weather and not the fertilizer's fault.

Variety trials - Spend one year using all the extra space in your garden to try growing multiple varieties of the same vegetable.  I've found many of my favorite varieties during "The Year of the Bean" or "The Year of the Squash."  
Different fertilizers
Different watering regimens
Different soil additives such as sulphur or seaweed - use these on one bed, but not another
Mulch or no mulch

~*~

I'm a TV Star!

Check it out!  Basics of Seed Starting.  My friend Colleen Dieter hosts Garden Journeys, a cute little segment on Time-Warner Cable News (being renamed Spectrum Cable News) that airs at 46 minutes past the hour, every hour, on Saturdays.  She asked me if I would be a guest and of course I said yes.

Seed Starting Basics aired already and is online available here.

Seed Saving Basics will be up this coming Saturday.  I'll add a link when it's available online.

I really enjoyed doing this, and it taught me a few things.  Condensing an entire one-hour class into a two-minute spot showed me exactly what is most important.  I may start giving a little two-minute synopsis at the beginning of each class to emphasize the most important takeaways from the entire hour and to let people know what to listen to most.

What fun!  I hope I can do that again.

Seed Starting Basics Class Outline

Seed Starting Basics

The reasons to start seeds are many.

• To have starts available on YOUR schedule.
• To have varieties that aren’t available locally.
• To avoid bringing in pests and diseases.
• To have big, healthy starts.
• To save money.
• To continue the chain of saving seeds.
• To have the satisfaction of doing it yourself and being self-reliant.
• For the fun of it.

Types of seeds:

• Hybrid
• GMO
• Open-Pollinated
• Heirloom

First, gather your tools.  

Must-haves are

• containers to start the seeds in,
• "soil" (anything light that doesn’t form a crust on top),
• small watering can/jug/bottle,
• misting bottle,
• labels,
• marking pencil,
• mild fertilizer (I like fish emulsion mixed with seaweed, or John’s Recipe, used half strength)
• and seeds.  

Nice-to-haves are:

• Lights ~ you can do this in a window IF you have a bright enough one (most aren’t), so lights might be a must-have..  
• Bottom heat is nice, too, especially for sprouting, but not really imperative if your house is warm enough.
• A cover for the tray to keep it moist (plastic wrap works great and it's cheap).
• Timer for the lights.
• Cold frame outside for hardening off.

A note about lights: Most windows don’t provide enough light. Large, south-facing ones might.  If you start to see legginess (elongated stems between each set of leaves), that’s a sign they’re not getting enough light.  In that case, use cool white flourescents with the most lumens you can find at the hardware store.  Hang the lights an inch above the seedlings’ leaves and raise in small increments as they grow.

Two rules to go by and you’ll do well:

1. Don’t plant the seeds too deep: deep enough is twice as deep as the seed is big.
2. Don’t let the seeds dry out: after germination, do let the top of the soil dry out, then let the dryness go progressively deeper as the seedlings get taller.

Planting Procedure:

1. Fill containers with slightly moistened seed starting mix.

1. Plan seeds twice as deep as the seed is big. This means some seeds will be practically sitting on top of the seed starting mix with only a light dusting of mix sifted on top of them.
2. Label them.  Do this immediately after sowing each type of seed or you WILL get them mixed up.
3. Bottom water until all seed starting mix is wet.  If this doesn’t happen after 24 hours, mist the top of the seed starting mix with your spray bottle until saturated, or use your watering can.
4. Keep warm and well watered and wait.
5. When germination has begun, place under lights if they aren’t there already.
6. Once seedlings have their first set of true leaves, let top of soil dry out, but only the top.  You can begin watering with a half-strength solution of fish emulsion and seaweed once a week.
7. Raise lights as needed, but only to one inch away from top of seedlings.

Repotting:

1. If starting seedlings individually: wait until they are WELL rooted in their current pots, then lift the root ball out with a fork and pot up into containers about ¼ bigger than their current container, watering in with seaweed.
2. If starting seedlings in a communal pot: wait until the seedlings have at least one set of true leaves, lightly grasp by a leaf and lightly pull while pricking under the roots with a pointed object (small fork, tweezers, point of a knife, etc.).  Transplant into an appropriately sized pot (small is better), and water in with half-strength seaweed. When well-rooted, pot up again according to the instructions above for individually grown seedlings.

Fertilizing:

Until the seedlings are good sized (a few inches tall and a few weeks old), only feed with half-strength fertilizer to avoid burning the seedlings.

Hardening off: Gradually getting the seedlings used to outdoor conditions.  This takes a week or so.

1. Put outside in morning sun for a couple of hours every day, gradually leaving them out longer each day, until they can stay out all day and night.
2. If you can’t bring them in and out so often, build a cold frame or use floating row cover - put the seedlings in the cold frame or under the row cover in the morning, then bring them in at night. Over the course of the week, gradually life the row cover or cold frame lid a few inches higher each day until they’re practically uncovered.

~ * ~

Worming the Garden

Went out to check sproutage today...

Beets're lookin' good.














Garlic, too.

Even the old mustard seeds I didn't think would sprout did.












But what's this?!
















And THIS?!?!?!















Oh, you little BASTARDS! You got them ALL!!!

FINE.  I'mma' gonna' get ALL o' YOU!!!!!

Bt.  Bacillus thuringensis.  Kills them ALL!  

BOTH the cabbage looper and cross-striped cabbageworm.  

Some tips for using Bt:

• Use fresh Bt.  If your bottle is four years old, it's dead.  Bt is alive, a bacteria that's dormant, and it dies over time or if left in prolonged heat.  Speaking of that:
• Store it at room temp.  If you left your bottle of Bt in the garage through last summer, it may be dead.  Buy another one and this time store it under the kitchen sink.  
• Mix a fresh batch each time.  When you mix it with water, it "wakes it up" and it dies in about a day and a half.  The worm has to eat it when it's alive, so spray in the evening if you can.  
• Coat the entire plant.  Pay close attention to the undersides of leaves.  A lot of the time moths will lay their eggs under leaves to protect them from rain.  When they hatch, the worms are so small they don't really move far, so if you don't spray under the leaves where they are, they'll likely survive and you'll have to deal with them later, when they're bigger and can eat more.  
• Tip for coating underneath leaves: Starting at the bottom of the plant, use a broom or leaf rake to "rake" the leaves upwards and follow it closely with the spray before the leaves fall back down.  
• One more tip: Some gardeners spray their entire garden once a week with Bt as a preventative.  I don't (obviously), but I may start.  Neem oil would be another good thing to use regularly since it would nip beetles in the bud when they're still tiny. 

Now go get those little bastards.  I did and feel much better for it.

~*~

Carrots and Radishes Together Again

I love this time of year.  Late fall, when everything starts to cool off and you can feel winter coming in the air.  Piles of pumpkins arrive at the grocery stores and mums show up at the garden center.

Gardening is so much better this time of year.  One can garden all day without fear of sweating to death.  No threat of said sweating for at least a few more months.  The weeds grow slower, the bugs are fewer, and the garden rebounds from the hellish nightmare of sumer.

And winter veggies!!  I ADORE winter veggies.  Mama was from Jackson, Mississippi, so you know I love me some greens.  Broccoli and cauliflower are sure winners, as are turnips and beets and carrots.  Romaesco, aka Broccoflower, a curious fractally spirally thing that tastes like a cauliflowery broccoli, or broccolish cauliflower.  Hence the name.

As you can see in the first photo above, I plant my radishes with my carrots to get a good stand of each.  Carrot seedlings are weak little things, so meek that even the slightest crust on top of the soil will smother them.  Radishes on the other hand are tough little musclemen, busting up through the toughest soil, crust or no crust.  I guess you'd say carrots are like three-year-olds - cut the crust off, Mom!  Okay, honey.  

They grow well together for another reason - by the time the radishes are harvestable, the carrots are big enough to need thinning, so I pick my radishes and that thins my carrots.  Neat, huh?

What kind of carrots, you ask?  Multicolored ones of course.  There's just something about pulling a purple carrot out of the ground that makes me insanely happy.  You should try them.  Then you can be insanely happy, too.

~*~

Canning Hot Peppers The Easy Way ~ AKA Small Batch Canning

Ever wanted to try canning, but didn't have the equipment?  Contrary to popular belief, most people have almost all the equipment in their kitchens already.

"WHAT?!  What do you mean, Linda?"

Let me show you it...

Yep.  Regular old kitchen towels, regular old tongs, regular old 5% vinegar, regular old measuring cups, and regular old pots - one big one for boiling the jars and one little one for boiling the brine.  

The only thing different about this that everyone may not have is the big pot - it's a pasta pot, with a colander insert.

If you don't have one, you can use any big pot as tall as your jars plus an inch and a half, and a collapsible vegetable steamer.  All you need is to keep the jars up off the bottom of the pot so water can circulate below them.  It doesn't have to be too far - half an inch will do.  And it needs to be tall enough so water covers your jars by a good bit - an inch is good - while boiling.  But if you can find a pasta pot, get one.  It's SO MUCH EASIER to do this with one.  Mainly because you can lower the jars into the boiling water with the insert instead of doing it one-by-one with tongs.

The only thing you need to buy are canning jars.  Canning is having a bit of a resurgence lately, so most grocery stores carry them.  I like to use half pint and quarter pint jars since I live alone, but full pint jars will work nicely as well.  They're as big as a can of green beans you buy from the store - a pint is 16 oz. and most canned goods are 15oz. (The RoTel in the photo is 10oz. I didn't have a can of green beans.) - so if those do well for you in feeding your family, so will canned things in pint jars. 

RoTel! And a pint, and a half pint, and a quarter pint.

While you're getting the jars, take a look at the canning tools.  Ball sells a kit that's only about fifteen bucks and has canning tongs (MUCH better than regular ones), a bubbler stick, a magnetic lid "getter", and a canning jar funnel to make it easier to pour stuff in the jars.   

Next, you need a recipe, a tested one.  Canning can easily be dangerous, especially water bath canning if the acidity of whatever you're canning isn't 4.6 acidity or more acidic.  Botulism survives boiling temps and grows in anything less acidic that 4.6pH.  It's odorless, flavorless, and invisible, so don't risk it - use a tested recipe and follow it.

Here's the one I use, from Ball Canning's website FreshPreserving.com, though if I have only a few peppers to do, I halve it (3 cups vinegar, 1 cup water, half as many peppers, SAME GARLIC! Bwahahahaha!).  

~*~

Pickled Hot Peppers
Makes 5 pints
2 and 3/4 lbs banana, jalapeno, or serrano peppers, or a combination of these varieties
6 cups vinegar (5% acidity)
2 cups water
3 cloves garlic, crushed

LEAVE peppers whole or cut into 1-inch pieces. Mix peppers together if using multiple varieties.
COMBINE vinegar, water, and garlic in a large saucepot. Bring mixture to a boil; reduce heat and simmer 5 minutes. Discard garlic.
PACK peppers into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Add Ball® Pickle Crisp to each jar, if desired.
LADLE hot liquid over peppers, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Remove air bubbles.
WIPE rim and adjust two-piece caps. Process 10 minutes in a boiling-water canner.

(Note: When cutting or seeding hot peppers, wear rubber gloves to prevent hands from being burned.)

~*~

(Note from Linda: When it says wear gloves, wear gloves.  Or you will find out exactly how often you rub your eyes, pick your nose, or touch your bits.)

~*~

So let's do this!  Step by step...

Assemble your stuff.  I have my Ball Blue Book out even though I don't use it often.  You don't need to buy one - all the info is on the FreshPreserving.com website - but it IS handy, especially if, like me, you do a lot of your productivity stuff when the internet's out.  

Boil your jars, lids, and rings to sterilize them.  To keep lime deposits off your jars, throw in a cup of vinegar.  It's not essential, so if you forget it, don't worry, but since it's right there on the counter and the jars look so much better without a white cloud on them...

Make your brine.  This is just vinegar and water and garlic.  Turn it on high and bring it to a boil.

While the brine's heating up, remove your jars to a clean towel.  BE CAREFUL!  If you're not paying attention, some of the water will run down your tongs and burn the shit out of you (just like it did to me right before I took the photo below - yeah, I'm an idiot.).  Don't pour the boiling water out of the big pot.  You're going to need that later.

Pack your jars with peppers.  I did some sliced, some halved, and some whole.  I like sliced ones with a steak, halved ones on sandwiches, and whole ones when eating tacos.  (I am NOT a foodie! Just spoiled.)

Your brine should be boiling by now.  Ladle or pour it into the jars but NOT to the top!  Stop half an inch down.  There's a thick ridge on the outside of the jars just below the threads for the lids.  That's half an inch down from the top, so just fill to that ridge line.  Your peppers will float, but not to worry - they'll eventually sink.  Why leave that space?  It's called "headspace" in canning parlance.  When you boil your jars, the contents will expand, and that space keeps it from expanding so much that it flows out of the jars, contaminating the rims and possibly making a pepper seed or somesuch get in the way of a good seal forming.

Remove air bubbles.  Use a butter knife or that bubbler stick the came in your tool kit to push the peppers around a bit to let the air bubbles escape.  Since I'm doing quarter pint jars, there really aren't that many air bubbles that get trapped, but if I were doing larger jars or more "sticky" stuff like peach preserves, big pockets of air can get trapped halfway down the jar and that takes up space that could be taken up by food.

Wipe the rims with a clean towel and put the lids and rings on BUT ONLY FINGER TIGHT.  Remember how the stuff in the jars expands?  It forces air out and you have to leave the lids just loose enough for that to happen without exploding the jars, but tight enough that the water in the boiling pot doesn't get in.

Load the jars in your pasta pot insert.  This is why a pasta pot with an insert is so handy for this.  If you don't have an insert, you have to lower them down into the pot of boiling water, one by one, carefully.  CAREFULLY.  I don't know about you, but I know about me, and I'd screw that one up in grand fashion.  So I'm glad I have a pasta pot.

Remember that boiling water from sterilizing your jars in the beginning?  That's the same water we're going to water bath can with now.  Handy, huh?  BUT, and THIS IS IMPORTANT - I pour out most of the water before I lower the pasta pot insert into it OR IT WILL OVERFLOW.  I don't pour it down the sink because I'll put most of it back in in a minute.  I just pour it in the brine pot to hold it since that pot's empty now.

Carefully lower the jars into what's left of the boiling water, pour in the reserved boiling water in the brine pot 'til it covers the jars by one inch, or as close to an inch as you can get.

Put the lid on and bring it back to a rolling boil.

After it reaches a full rolling boil, set your timer for ten minutes.

DING!  Take your jars out of the pot, set them on a kitchen towel, and tighten them the rest of the way.  Use a kitchen towel or hot pad to handle them 'cause they're hot!

And listen to the satisfying "PING!" of all the seals setting!  The next day, make sure the little "bubble" or "reverse dent" in the top of each lid is now a DENT.  If any of them are still up and not down, refrigerate those and eat them first.

I did 8 quarter-pints and 1 half-pint last night since that's about as much as my pasta pot will hold.  The rest of the jars are the ones I did in class, including one of orange habaneros.  

This may be a banner year for pickled peppers.  Roger said he's going to leave the peppers in the garden at work 'til frost, so I hope to get more of them - more jalapenos, more habaneros, and maybe even some little spicy bells and Tabascos.  The Tabasco plants are absolutely covered with peppers, so I may even try to find a good tested recipe for Tabasco sauce!  Wouldn't that be awesome?  Why yes, yes it would.  Almost as awesome as the Ghost peppers Casie's giving me. ...  I'd better get the ice cream maker oiled up and ready...

~*~