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Post by canadamike on Dec 22, 2012 21:47:13 GMT -5
King of the North always made it for me and my friends, though I am staying away of bells as much as I can and have been doing so for years.
Doe Hill is perfect, so is Alma Paprika, I have a triumvirate, and TOPEPO ROSSO is the number 3. Absolutely exquisite taste, productive, the best red roaster I have seen, beats the crap off the supposedly roasting peppers, a name for ''too thinned fleshed''...
Alma Paprika is the best pizza pepper I have tasted...The teenagers in my neck of the woods would love my pizza and its ''special'' taste...read Alma...with only a small pinch of heat...
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Post by canadamike on Dec 20, 2012 17:47:16 GMT -5
Alan has the answer, which is yes, he knows I am sure, but this forum is followed by a lot of folks, 500 a day is much less than it used to be, believe me... multiply it by 4 or 5...
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Post by canadamike on Dec 18, 2012 16:22:21 GMT -5
Might I step in and also recommend RED SWAN?
Immensely productive for me, even in the coldish and rainy year of 2008, and they make fantastic canned green beans, I can them in the presto with only a half inch of water in the bottom of the mason jar and they keep for 2 years without browning. I once posted a picture of a 2 year old jar here, in some post somewhere...
Maybe they keep for longer than that, but I ate them all before knowing...
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Post by canadamike on Dec 9, 2012 5:56:00 GMT -5
Up here in Canada, in Ottawa, I grew all the accessions that were supposed to give true seeds. Total failure. ALL gave plantlets. SSE had a great article in its members ''magazine'' ( dunno how to call it'' but I think the environment has a lot to do with this. It was already complicated for them, I do not remember the article much, really, aprt from the fact I did something similar to what gave the m success...
Do not ask me what, I do not recall, it was an uneasy period of my gardening life, but I vividly remember saying to myself ''I did just that''. But plantlets came out. I am sure photoperiod has something to do with it...
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Post by canadamike on Dec 2, 2012 1:11:11 GMT -5
There is a lot of stuff on the net about foliar feeding. But we must not think it is a miracle thing, it has a big role to play to help, but the role of the roots of plants is not dead yet One way that it helps a lot, apart from the abilities of plants to translocate nutrients is that when it fills the leaves, they give the signal to the rest of the plant that '' we are ok here, you can focus elsewhere''. And that elsewhere is often fruits You have to work with it really, foliar neans everything or nothing, it always depends on what is used. There is an excellent research done on humic acids and millet on the net, I have it in my puter. It documents all sorts of feeding techniques, using humic acid in millet, and it concludes that by many measurement methods, foliar is optimum. I have attached it here. Quite interesting Attachments:
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Post by canadamike on Nov 18, 2012 22:45:59 GMT -5
I strongly suspect late season grown Early Jersey Wakefield would fit the bill. It has done great here in ALL seasons, I sure did keep for a good while in the fall for me, but it ended up eaten before I could measure its long keeping qualities
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Post by canadamike on Nov 16, 2012 13:46:49 GMT -5
very intereting....thanks I suspect it is more about carboxylic acids than else. You can look up NUTRISORB, it is probably similar. www.innovakglobal.com/en/products/nutrisorb-l The granular version is OMRI listed (in the process), the liquid, they are working to change it a bit to make it organic
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Post by canadamike on Nov 15, 2012 23:01:19 GMT -5
Hello Mike and Joyce...
So...how was it? Please tell us more.
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Post by canadamike on Nov 15, 2012 21:38:32 GMT -5
Sweetness is a very tricky thing. The food industry uses calcium based compounds in processed food to increase the ''perception'' of sweet. This summer, I had raspberries so ''sweet'' that in order to make jam, instead of the usual 1/1 ratio of sugar to fruit, I had to bring sugar/fruit ratio to 1/4. The refractometer measured 10% brix, nothing to be excited about, 14-15% would have been great, albeit hardly achievable for our climate. 12 is kind of the limit. But the sweetness perception is out of the roof. They got plenty of seaweed, and then some calcium. Calcium is great to build sugar levels in fruits but also increase the perception of the sweet taste. All in all, the sweetest raspberries I ever had in my life, this summer harvest, are not that sweet at all. I did some research on the net, and it turns out that lots of minerals and calcium together can give that perception. It is great, because sugar is not that good for health, even from fruits if there is too much, and I know for sure that if I was a diabetic, wanting some sweet taste, I could use lots of seaweed (a truckload of minerals) and calcium to increase the perception of sweetness without going to the hospital or taking insuline. I have NO CLUE of the cultivar of raspberries I have home, we bought the house last year and the patch was there. Just made raspberry sorbet out of some yesterday...2 pounds of them and half a cup of sugar.... DIVINE...and sweet enough for my very sweet tooth...and for my Suzanne who did not believe a MAN could make a sorbet What we did later is none of your business, but I strongly recommend to the guys here to make sorbet for their wives
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Post by canadamike on Nov 14, 2012 17:05:21 GMT -5
Growing giant pumpkins can be done 2 way: if you are going to buy seeds all the time from respected growers, do not even bother self pollinating, it has NO effect...the fruits are the ovaries, you do not care about the babies, they could be pollinated by a miniature maxima and it would not show.
If you want to self pollinate to buid up your own strain, buy seeds from winners, there is a trade market for them on the net, they are very expensive but worth it.
Then hand pollinate, but NOT only by taping the female, also tape the male about to open...this male flower can be visited by bees too, albeit in a different part of the day.
And if you really want a HUGE pumpkin, you need about 2 tons of manure and compost per plant, about one ton in a pile, the rest spread around so the nodes of the maximas will grow in a rich medium and root at the internodes in rich soil.
You let 2 pumknins grow a bit, select the largest one, then kill the undesired one and ALL the other flowers showing up.
You water VERY regularly and you foliar feed every few days with seaweed and fish emulsion, or a mix already made like Neptune's Harvest, the most commonly used, and also NOW, with a CO2 fertilizer, like Lithovit.
LIthovit is responsible for the explosion in weight of the giant pumkins records in the last years.
NO record in the world now is without it. What it does is introduce by foliar feeding an unstable molecule of calcium carbonate that is ready to give without much energy needed from the plant some carbon in the system. It is like the result of photosynthesis without photosynthesis, so it works all day long, and photosynthesis still happens.
So when it is cold and rainy and dark in the sky, the plant still makes chemical reactions with the same result: more carbon in it: bigger and greener leaves. LIke if it was warm, breesy and sunny.
YOu, of course, still get whatever warmth and sun there is...just something more.
It is the reason my friend ended up with the canadian record, 1678 pounds, ON ITS FIRST YEAR of doing it. He also was the canadian champ for the biggest tomato, 6 and something pounds, in Peterborough Ontario, not exactly your dreamy giant vegetable place.
No wins without CONSTANT foliar feeding, either in Canada, Europe, USA, Australia or else.
Most have their lil'something else added, secret things like beer or diluted milk ( I prefer the latter) but this is the basis of the stuff.
One thing I told JIm to add in the recipe is 4-5 shovels of alfalfa meal, in Canada, they plant them very late in order to have them at their maximum potential in October, when the measurements are made.
Here, you can get frost before that, and it kills all the leaves despite the fruit being OK. ALfalfa contains triacontanol, a growth hormone that is also a fatty alcool. It has protected my crops for almost 30 years from light frosts, since alcool has a lower freezing point.
And it is also a growth hormone...
Good luck
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Post by canadamike on Nov 14, 2012 0:56:55 GMT -5
I dunno...it comes in the form of a powder and is not super stable, which explains it is done in small batches only apparently.
I never worked with LAB, can you tell me more...can we read about this one somewhere???
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Post by canadamike on Nov 8, 2012 18:36:00 GMT -5
As long as I remember, Absinthe is from Alan. It is related to the color.
Raymondo: is Japanese Black Trifele a first for you??
IN that case, I suggest you grow a lot of it. Apart from Bloody Butcher, magnificent but small, it is the best canning and sauce making tomato I have ever grown. Much better canned than so called ''italians''. Darker sauce too, which is not bad, as many italians lack true inside color.
I will NOT can anymore italians I think, unless for sauce, as canned regular tomatoes impart way more flavour to soups and stews. I had a few chefs come here and they loved the complexity of my simple tomato and rice soup, which I am proud of, and it is the simplest of any soups you can find around. But since 70% of the flavor compounds are in the gel around the seeds,
I have canned for 30 years or so, the standards for exhibition say the tomatoes should look homogeneous, the only problems is that it means altering the tomatoes by pre-cooking them too much to my taste before canning or adding tomato paste. So it looks nice.
But taste nice is what I want.
And the clear stuff if far from being only water, especially if you have cooked them a bit before canning.
The clear stuff is where most of the flavour is. ANd in soups and stews, where you add water...the liquid is already there, you simply adjust with a clear stuff without taste calles water.
It is easy for any experienced person to can a perfect jar of tomatoes. But I have decided I would not do it anymore, it ends up in taking away too much flavor.
I am now proud of the watery looking bottoms I hated so much for almost 30 years.
They mean I threw nothing away, did not overcook anything, did not alter, and the taste is pure bliss.
It reminds me. A few years ago, I was canning so many tomatoes and by-products like juice or sauce I could not do it all in a day...I would put 5 gallons of the juice I had made outside, since it was cold, and come back to see half of the pail with clear stuff that I threw away to save on cooking time.
One day I tasted the clear stuff.
Never threw an once away since then.
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Post by canadamike on Nov 8, 2012 17:33:49 GMT -5
OH! And MIkeH, I forgot to tell you how nice it was to meet you and your wife in Niagara last sujmer.
I really enjoyed our discussion. I could not stop by on the way back, It ended up I finished earlier than planned although it was wonderful meeting these professional organic farmers, you were not back home when I was around your place.
Guys, MIkeH and his wife are TRUE ONES, really great lovable and competent people, if I ever move back to Ontario they could be a reason for it ;D
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Post by canadamike on Nov 8, 2012 17:30:05 GMT -5
I'll use a simple construction tape to measure, thanks ;D
As for market squashes, what we see in the stores might be of help to us if we think of it: I work with market growers, thay have had to go for smaller squashes for a very simple reason: people do not have cold storage anymore, and the basements, in the areas where they have some, are often a part of the house now....not the basements we all had when we were young...with dirt or crude cement.
Most are now true hybrids, but it does not mean much really...you can hybridize 2 butternuts and will end up with a pretty similar butternut in the end, there is not much difference in size. They have made them smaller, but it is surely more by selection of the mother and father lines than else. If you want a small butternut, you will not be stupid enough to use a huge one as one of the parents, unless you tried a cross and it gave you a freak result that is repetitive...not a thing to expect given the number of hybrids on the market today. A freak thing is a freak thing because it is NOT the norm...
May I recommend PASTILLA SHAMPAN, which I got from Hristo and is for sales in GERMANY, FOR ITS EXQUISITE VANILLA TASTE. And also long keeping capabilities.
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Post by canadamike on Nov 8, 2012 17:15:06 GMT -5
Raymondo, you just about described how they make new beds of cranberries...lay them on the ground, cover them a little, make sure they do not dry out...
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