Garden Badassity

[badasswizard]

I am feeling excellent about putting away the garden prior to freezing weather hitting.

I gleaned a bunch of peppers-jalapeno, bell and chili--from a local garden space that the owners weren't planning to harvest. Since yesterday, I processed 5 dehydrator trays of peppers, roasted 2 trays in the oven and started several batches of fermented hot sauce (about 3 quarts!) Since I love hot sauce and put it on everything this is amazing.

Also cooked a ton of winter squash and froze it as puree.

After the frost hits, my family and I are going to go harvest persimmons from trees we can find.

The only downside is I should have worn gloves for pepper processing--now my cuts are tingly.

[OddOne]

nitrile  type garden gloves are great for processing peppers. Got a pair in my canning kit just for that.

Congrats on all the gleaning and preserving. Makes for happy days in the winter!

[Siobhan]

Word of advise if you get anything hotter then a jalapeno...dehydrating them is like producing your own pepper spray, learned that one this year...had to open all the windows in the house when I was dehydrating my stash of cayennes and fish peppers, plan on going out after you put them in the trays lol

[Zaga]

Lol, yes on drying hot peppers!  One year I bought a tray of hot peppers, it was mislabeled as sweet peppers.  But not wanting them to go to waste I dried them in my convection toaster oven on low temp, then pureed them.

Mistake.  Don't blend up dried hot peppers, at least not inside!  My nose bled for like 2 days.  It doesn't take much of that dust to really irritate the mucous membranes!  I did get a very nice jar of hot pepper flakes though :-)

This year all I managed to put up was one big batch of salsa from my tomatoes.  Very tasty, but not enough to last the year out sadly.