Thekla McDaniels

I remember having a sleepover with one of my friends when I was 12 or 13. The mother was serving home canned green beans with supper. At that age, I had already heard about the dangers of home canned green beans and I was young enough to not be embarrassed to ask the mother of my friend about it. She said yes, I canned them, but I always boil them 20 minutes before serving.

I wonder if this is a step all too often left out of stories about grandma’s canned green beans.  A lot of the cooking in those days and certain regions included the process of “boiling it down”.

Jay Angler wrote:

Thekla McDaniels wrote: When I make salsa, I use pH test strips to be sure I don’t dilute the acid in the tomatoes with too much chilies and onions.

I love homemade salsa - so I add a little vinegar because I really don't trust the modern tomatoes to have near the acid they used to have. As you say, better to be safe than sorry.

🤣🤣 I add vinegar AND use the pH test strips!

There’s a recipe many people swear has to be included in Thanksgiving dinner.

Canned green beans, can of mushroom soup, canned crispy onions on top.  Bake.

My sister and I tried to make a substitute from scratch.  Sautéed mushrooms in white sauce, green beans fresh frozen or canned per your preference, carmelized onions.  Hard for me to report results because I am neutral to the original recipe, but I bet a cook who cared could make a great casserole adding flavor and texture to surround those beans🤣. I like scalloped potatoes,  how about adding an equal volume of green beans to your scalloped potato recipe?

I am deathly afraid of botulism. Here’s what I believe is true:  It is a normally occurring soil organism.  The spores aren’t deactivated by temperatures achieved in boiling water bath canners, regardless of time spent there.

The poison created by Clostridium botulinum is a neurotoxin. It results in paralysis, so you stop breathing.  It’s not a matter of food poisoning vomiting.

I don’t like canned green beans so I never face the question of how to can them.  What I DO love is home made chicken broth, another low acid food.  I pressure can it.  Living at high altitude, I have to adjust the weight, the number of pounds of pressure, and the time.

I have what might be called a superstitious side.  Even having made and canned the broth, sometimes I get a feeling that the broth may be dangerous as I open the jar…  in that case  I boil it for 15 minutes, instead of simply heating it.  Although boiling water bath canning doesn’t deactivate the spores, it DOES destroy the toxin created when a spore comes to life and contaminates the food in the anaerobic conditions of created by canning.  How long to boil also depends on elevation.

I am not necessarily a rule follower.  I have canned hundreds of gallons of high acid high sugar preserves by the open kettle method, never even had a jar not seal.

If I am not going to follow the rules and recommendations, I need to understand every aspect of the process… because I believe my life depends on it

When I make salsa, I use pH test strips to be sure I don’t dilute the acid in the tomatoes with too much chilies and onions.

I got some unknown variety squash seeds at the local seed swap.

I have a 16x16 feet plot for a soil development project.  It’s compact alkaline soil with a high clay content.

I dug a 4 feet x 8feet depression in the center, about 9 inches deep in the center.  Then i drilled 10 inch diameter holes 2-3 feet deep in the depression and the original level of soil around the depression.  I covered it over with woodchips.  I planted tiny bare root seedling trees and seeds over it all, and watered it often.  A squash seeds germinated and I have a squash plant with a vining habit.

There’s not a lot of fertility or biology in the original soil, that’s what I’m trying to develop.

Gor fertilizer, I get the stuff from the bottom of the chicken house… mixed straw, sand, and chicken poop, and sprinkle it around the “dripline” of the squash vine.

I started feeding the squash plant because of the state of the soil, AND the chips are fresh, and I want my plants to have what they need even while the woodchips are drawing whatever nitrogen they can out of the soil….  And I want the woodchips have what they need to decompose.

The squash plants are healthy, although they do wilt every day for a few hours.  I water them every other day and they look fresh vigorous and alive each morning.  

No female flowers yet.  I’m starting to think I might pull off most of the male flowers, so the plant devote its efforts to more flowers.

Searching back in my garden memories, that makes a lot of sense.  One year I got a whole bed weeded, thought I was done.🤣  I was so young then!  Next thing that happened, a whole different crop of weed seedlings germinated and I got to weed again.  For the most part those new weeds were a purple amaranth.  That’s when I became aware of some of my assumptions and became conscious that seeds from different plants germinate under different conditions….  Learning has been so much fun, and gardens are good teachers!

And I began mulching weeded areas to prevent the warm season seed germination.

Next year I think I will try some amaranth in my garden.  There are so many and our summers are getting longer and hotter!

So many variables!  Here in the high desert, the big problem is with grasshoppers.  I have been watching them very closely this year!

Finally the preying mantises are big enough to help!  I pick them off my plants when I can, but at times the grass rattles with them.  I have guineas and chickens, and even my cats chase catch and eat grasshoppers!  We have wild turkeys and they eat a lot of grasshoppers too.

Earlier in the season the grasshoppers chewed up lots of hollyhock seedlings.  I don’t know what happened to change this but in the last few weeks the hollyhock seedlings have begun to grow back.  

I planted a beautiful lemon balm plant which was chewed to the ground.  I don’t know if when fall comes, it will resprout.  That is what happened with my young elderberry trees last year.

This year I put some row cover over my elderberries.  It doesn’t protect them completely, especially with the wind blowing it aside so often.  I keep thinking that eventually the elderberries will get big enough that the grasshopper chewing won’t bother them, but that may be a fruitless act of faith.

It’s hard to understand processes at times.  I had 2 shasta daisies about 2 feet apart.  Same origin, may be clones off the same plant.  They did ok for quite awhile.  Then the grasshoppers ate one to no trace stage.  The other one is blooming now🤷🏻‍♀️

Anyway, I agree wholeheartedly that to arrive at a healthy population of insect predators, I have to support the prey insect species.  And it’s tough!

There’s a nest of roughly two dozen guinea eggs one of the g - hens has begun to set on.  I am hoping hard for her success!  I only have a total of 5 guineas and although I am sure they reduce the populations greatly, at my place and my 3 neighbors we’re talking more than 40 acres of grasshopper habitat that surrounds me.

What I am watching for is which plants the grasshoppers don’t eat.  Sunflowers, squash vine, locust tree saplings, Rocky Mountain bee plant, Maximilian sunflowers, strawberries probably many others.  That’s where I need to concentrate my efforts !

Donna Lynn wrote:

It's been about two weeks, and nothing has sprouted yet.  I keep the soil consistently moist, and the container is outside in dappled shade/sun in zone 5.  There is a slight possibility a chipmunk dug it up and ate it, but I don't see any obvious soil disturbance like I normally do when they dig in my plants.  I'll keep watching...

Darn rodent land mates!  I have prairie dogs.  It amounts to the same thing, they just don’t recognize common goals!

🤞🤞🤞 for your berry seedlings!

I want to germinate strawberries as well!  I first have to find some of the wild type strawberries.  I do have 4 live plants I planted earlier this year.  I think if I want to move towards arid alkaline high elevation tolerance I want to start with simpler genetics instead of strawberry heritage that has been through so many years of commercial production and propagation, complete with fungicides.  I guess just to practice the process, I could try any strawberry I can get my hands on!

Again good luck on the seeds you have come so far with

I think there are primo cane blackberries and raspberries, and thornless— blackberries anyway, I don’t know about thornless raspberries.

That’s not much help to folks with established patches, but might be of interest to those in the planning phase

Anybody know how deep the roots go on oaks and M111 roots.

I just think possibly the M111 stayed relatively shallow while the oak has very deep roots, but maybe I just made that up.