Today is Daylight Savings Day, which means we lost an hour of sleep here - but it will remain light outside for an hour later than before, so that is appealing. It will also stay dark an hour later, but I tend to be asleep, so I don't notice it on that end.
Today is also the day I started my first batches of seeds for the garden. We are about 11 weeks out from the last frost date in my growing zone, so I started my onion seeds and pepper seeds today.
I also finally got around to dealing with the last of the peppers from the 2023 harvest. We generally have good luck with peppers here. I had perhaps 6 or 8 jalapeno plants, 2 habanero plants, 2 cayenne pepper plants, 2 hot banana pepper plants and 2 sweet pepper plants. We had a great jalapeno harvest; I canned 12 pint jars of jalapenos. I also had enough to can 2 jars of hot banana peppers and 1 can of habaneros. I had planned the habaneros to be used for salsa, but unfortunately my tomato plants all had some sort of blight, so I didn't harvest any in 2023. I think it was due to the insanely soggy summer we had here. It rained way more than usual, and I don't think I needed to water the garden more than twice all season. It was great for the cucumbers, so not so much for tomatoes. You'd think then that we would have an excess of hababeros, but no - the pint jar I put them into broke in the water bath, and they were a complete loss. I did have some left that I tossed into the freezer whole. Those went into the freeze dryer today, along with the cayenne peppers that I dehydrated last fall.
I didn't receive the freeze dryer until late November 2023, so it was past the time for harvest preparation for the most part. As the cayenne peppers were already dehydrated and the habaneros were already frozen, these were easy and suitable to toss into the freeze dryer. Then I can either crush them and add to a recipe or rehydrate them for another use. The cayenne peppers likely will not rehydrate well, as they were dehydrated prior to going in the freeze dryer, so those are likely to be crushed into flakes or powder.
These are all now processed and safely tucked away into shelf-stable food storage. I am loving the freeze dryer, and I think this will be a game changer in the fall for not letting my hard work in the garden go to waste. I can be canning WHILE I am freeze drying. It's also a shorter active time commitment to run the freeze dryer as compared to the canner. Once the freeze dryer is going, I can step away and let it do its thing...which may take overnight. I tend to only run the canner (pressure canner or water bath canner) on the weekends, but I will often run the freeze dryer during the week and just swap it over outside of working hours.
So while the 2023 pepper processing has come to a close, the 2024 season has kicked off on the same day. I am always excited to set the first seeds of the year into potting soil, as I look forward to a new growing season. I may not be the best gardener, but I keep trying, I get a little better each year, and I always learn something new. Here's to the 2024 growing season!
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