Canning and Propagating..

Cool stuff this time around.. first, I did my first canning  operation at home here, with the help of my pal Crystal. She's a highly experienced canner, and really made pro work of the whole project. Well, except she stuck her hand in boiling water once.. oh, and goofed around with seriously hot peppers and wasn't wearing gloves which caused her to cry most of the night because of burning fingers from the Jalapeno's and Habanero's capsaicin. But that's trivial stuff. Check these pics of the process:

Here's Crystal, smashing some Hab's into the jars.. what a pro!

..a pic of the whole operation..

..and a shot of the finished products.

All in all, we made a buch of these jars up and every one of them sealed up fine. Crystal made off with a few of 'em, and I've got 6 half pint jars and 9 whole pint jars to show for our 3.5-4 hour process. The process itself was pretty straight forward, but time consuming. We used the stove in the kitchen, as you can see from the pics, but I think next time we do this, I'll drag out the brewery equipment and we'll use that stuff to heat our water up. Most of the time wasting was due to poor heat up times for the boiling water, which a 55k brewery burner would make short work of. We'll keep that in mind for next time, like I said. 

In other news, I just got my Garland "Super 7" seedling propagator in the mail yesterday. Check this out:

This is the tiny 4x6 seeding propagator tray.. the holes in the bottom allow the water from the lower tray to be wicked up the, well, wicking material, and into the tray, so you never have to take off the top cover to water these. They always stay perfectly hydrated, just like a sub-irrigated planter would. That's pretty much what sold me on this thing, because of the promise I saw with my Earthbox and 'Global Bucket' projects.. 

Here's the water tray and the standoff I mentioned above, that keep the little propagators from sinking in the water.. 

And here's that funny water wicking material that goes on top of the standoff, and under the trays, to bring the water up to the soil. 

Here's an overall view of the contraption, and you can see that there's 7 trays with covers in total.

The other thing that really sold me was.. you get things that germinate at different rates, like at 68 degrees, our typical basement temp in the winter (coal stove power!), lettuce will come up in about 3 days, but peppers will take up to nearly 2 weeks.. if all the seedlings were in one large tray of some sort, you'd have some things out of the soil and some things still in the ground all going at different times. Ideally, you want to keep the clear tops on while things germinate to keep the moisture in, and then take the tops off after they break the surface, so you don't get mold growth. This setup allows that action, because everything can be kept individually growing in their own compartments. Nice idea. 

Also, these things are made from *thick*, reusable plastic. As long as I don't run these over with a car, they'll last a good long time. I'm not sure how long the thinner plastic kits will last. Still, I've never used this before, so we'll see how it goes. I do have some experience 'pricking out' seedlings and keeping them alive now, since I've been screwing with my planter box on the deck. I have at least some faith, because of that. :)

Anyhow, that's what I've got for the day.. so, get lost!