Larisa Walk

Dry, soup type peas are easy to shell. Their pods are flat and don't shrink around the peas like some of the sweeter pea varieties do.  We put the dried in the pod soup peas in a large tub and use an electric hand mixer to break open the pods (you'll need a cloth draped over the tub to keep the peas from flying all over the place).  Then you can pick out the pods and winnow what's left to get down to clean, edible dry peas. When seed saving the wrinkled pod types, hand shelling works best.

For fresh peas, there are roller devices to speed up the chore, kind of like a wringer on an old washing machine. We used to have a hand cranked one and I seem to remember that these were available as an electric gadjet as well. I think these devices would work better if the pods were very lightly steamed or blanched first, but not too much so that the peas would get smashed in the process (save the water to make broth with the pods after shelling).  Maybe just a brief dunk in a colander into a pot of boiling water would be sufficient? Probably would need a towel or cloth to keep the peas from shooting out and escaping.

We too prefer snow peas to eat pods and all. Lately we've been focusing on varieties with brown seeds as they also make good soup peas if the pods get ahead of us at harvest time. We gave up on snap peas as the birds preferred them but even snow peas need Remay protection most years.

You can nixtamalize sorghum just like corn with either wood ash or use pickling lime from the grocery store. I use 1 Tbsp lime for 2 cups of grain. Easier to do and you don't need the mess or worry of using wood ashes, not that you shouldn't try it that way but to get comfortable with the process the pickling lime is a gateway ingredient ;>).

We grow Siberian peaches from seed. The trees are rather short-lived and so whenever we have a crop we plant the pits so we'll have eventual replacement stock. The first year we did this I fussed around by putting the pits in trays in the root cellar, tried various methods of keeping them moist (plastic cover, misting, etc.) Ran out of trays and containers with lots of pits leftover so threw the rest into the compost heap. Only one of the cellared pits germinated but the compost heap had many peaches germinate when the soil warmed up. Talking to a friend with more experience than we had said he always plants Siberian peach pits outdoors right after harvest. So now we make a nursery bed with rows about 6" apart and furrow the pits about 2" deep and packed into the rows so the pits are touching. Enough germinate so that we end up with a tree every 6" or so. We've also successfully done this with Siberian apricots and butternuts. Here in Minnesota we don't get a peach crop every year but the trees usually survive, for the most part, and will fruit in subsequent years when the conditions are more favorable. It's not always the severe winter cold temps that are the problem. Usually it's spring frosts after blossoming. The apricots are worse in that regard as they flower waaay too early. Last year was the first real crop in 14 years and I would have to say that they really weren't worth waiting for. Nothing beats a tree ripened peach, but when it looks like there won't be a crop (no blossoms or too early flowering) we make sure we have a good patch of melons planted (Petit Gris de Rennes is our favorite). Dehydrated melon is a superior replacement for dehydrated peaches.

Larisa Walk wrote:Aluminum window screen with the join stapled together with an ordinary office stapler.  Cheap and effective.

Now, many years later, we no longer use staples to join the screen into a tube. It's simpler to just fold and crimp the edges together.  Makes it easier to remove if needed.

Thanks for taking time to reply to my query. I took the plunge and bought seed of Wildfire so we'll see how it does here in Minnesota. Our upper midwest climate has always been challenging, but even more so in recent years especially with a roller coaster of excessive rains or droughts. Our clay/loam soil does help with some of these fluctuations. And of course we still have the usual ups and downs of temperatures. So short season strategy for everything is working better than ever to get crops to maturity with fewer days of exposure to the harsh extremes. "Normal" is no longer in play. Hope you have a great growing season!

We have loads of cast iron, but recently bought a wok that is made from spun iron. We love it, all of the benefits of using cast iron but much lighter and quicker to heat up. The cake pan you've pictured should perform much like an old steel pan that we once had. Gives a nice browning to the exterior surfaces.

I've never harvested the greens in the fall although we've grown them for over 40 years in Wisconsin/Minnesota. We use them for early spring onions and also dehydrate them then when we lift the clumps to divide and refresh the bed. But to illustrate how tough they are we used to harvest the topsests to feed to our sheep each year to keep them from "walking" all over the garden. One year I forgot about a bucket of the topsets and left them sitting in an open-sided shed without cover. In the spring they were greening up and ready to grow.

Bags of leaves around the foundation - like bales of straw but free and can use them on garden in the spring. We once knew someone in Wisconsin who insulated a cold dairy barn with many layers of flattened cardboard boxes stapled onto the walls (there was hay in the loft so the top was already insulated). With the cows inside it felt cozy.  Bubblewrap can be applied to windows by misting the glass with water, then press the bubblewrap's smooth side against the glass and it will stay in place until you peel it off in the spring, no tape or adhesives needed.  And yes, you should try to insulate a smaller space in the structure and concentrate the heat there rather than trying to keep the whole space warm. Wear lots of layers of wool, silk, or other animal fibers. Fingerless gloves and hats are useful indoors as well as out.

Anyone here growing the Wildfire Dent Corn that is sold by Adaptive Seeds? Looking for a review - does it lodge easily, can it also handle wetter weather like the upper Midwest, have you cooked with it?