I grew sugar babies and black diamonds this year with pretty.ediocre results. I just harvested them all because It's probably getting too cold for them to ripen any further. They are meh on sweetness. Do I just chuck them all out for my chickens to eat or is there something I should try to use them for? Any creative ideas?
I was making a vanilla flavored simple syrup and I guess I boiled it too long because it got hard after it cooled off. So now I have a lump of hard vanilla sugar type thing. Can I re-liquidy it or use it for something at this point or is it just garbage?
Recipe:
1 c sugar
1 c water
2 whole vanilla beans
I planted some black diamond watermelons and I thought that they were getting ripe but I've picked two now with sad results. Both had dried tendrils and the second one's stem was starting to look dry so I thought I was good. I will accept that I could just be too early but is it also possible that it crossbreed with something? The second one looked more yellow rather than pinkish inside.
I've got some mammoth sunflowers that have developed seed heads but the seeds look too immature still (I think). You can see in the photo that the seeds don't really have any black stripes on the hulls. I want the seeds for eating/using for human food and I don't want them to mold or get attacked by critters. When should I cut them and dry the heads?
Just loving how huge these guys are. The only reason I can reach the one flower head is because it's bending down now that it's heavy.
I found this little guy inside my house (no idea how it got there) and it looks all crumpled. My assumption is that it just emerged from the cocoon (again... why was it in my house?) and hasn't fully dried its wings yet but I wanted to make sure. I moved it outside and it's been a couple of hours but it still hasn't flown away. Wings still don't seem flat.
I've done lots of canning and a little pickling in my time but this is my first forray into fermentation of any kind.
Backstory: I grew too many slicing cucumbers and enough people said I could still pickle them that I decided to try. I'm going to try fermented and low temp canning to see which one turns out most to my liking.
Here is the recipe I did for this batch:
To 1 quart jar add:
1/4 tsp calcium chloride
1/4 tsp chili flakes
1 dill head worth of seeds
1 sprig fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
2 cloves garlic
Tare scale
Pack jar with cucumber spears
Fill with water above cucumbers
Check total weight in grams
Add salt in the amount of = weight of cucumbers + water weight * .035 to reach 3.5% brine
Add glass weight to jar
Put lid on and shake
Loosen lid and set aside
Wish me luck!
Background: I'm terrible at thinning out seedlings so I have about 10 marketmore cucumber vines producing cucumbers. I've given them to friends and neighbors and have snuck cucumber into just about every meal and I can't keep up with the production. I'm picking around 10-15 a day. Sad thing is that I probably won't learn my lesson next year either. Any ideas about what I can do with too many non-pickling cukes?
Google says to harvest around 6-8 inches, is this accurate? I think the variety I'm growing are Millionaire eggplants.
There are two pines right next to each other and in all respects seem nearly identical. However they have different coloration to their pollen cones. Does that indicate diff species or something else?
For a lot of my childhood it seems like people were concerned with overpopulation and we are around like 8 Billion people so why is anyone concerned about lower birth rates?