Canning pickled garlic and peppers

I have read many canning recipes for pickled garlic or pickled peppers. We don’t like pickled anything. Can you can these just using water? I used to freeze the peppers but now being off the grid, I don’t have freezer room. If these can be canned with just water, what would I process them at?

Joni Warren
Canyon City, Oregon

Joni, you really need my book, Growing and Canning Your Own Food. Basic canning directions for sweet peppers are: Stem, core, and remove seeds and ribs. If you don’t want to can with skins on, as I do, you can plunge the whole peppers into boiling water for 3 minutes, then into cold water. The skins will slip quite easily. Then stem, core, etc. Pack gently into hot jars, leaving 1 inch of headspace. Add ½ tsp. salt and ½ tsp. vinegar or lemon juice (improves flavor) to each pint. Fill jars with boiling water, leaving 1 inch of headspace. Process pints and half pints at 10 pounds pressure for 35 minutes in a pressure canner. If you live at an altitude above 1,000 feet, consult your canning book for instructions on increasing your pressure to suit your altitude.

Garlic is not recommended for canning, although you can use it in mixed recipes as a spice. It dehydrates beautifully and you can make your own garlic powder with a blender or grinder. Peppers dehydrate very well too. — Jackie

Tomatoes not ripening

This is the first year I have grown Bill Bean tomatoes in my raised garden beds. The plants are huge and healthy and have lots of huge healthy green tomatoes but I have not gotten one ripe tomato as yet. We have had a very mild cool summer, could that be the reason or do you think they may be overcrowded in the raised beds?

Brenda Burns-Boggs
Kettering, Ohio

Cool weather does slow down the tomatoes. Our own are a little late this year as we had a very cool, wet spring. Hang in there and you’ll soon be eating ripe tomatoes! If you prune away some of the lower leaves so the tomatoes get more sun, that’ll hurry them up some. — Jackie

3 COMMENTS

  1. Brenda

    I once had some hens that quit laying for no reason. I posted a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad in their coop and within about two days, I was getting plenty of eggs! Hmmmmmm

  2. The day after I wrote to you about my Bill Bean tomatoes two of them began to ripen. I now know how to encourage my produce to “produce”, “Ask Jackie”. Scares them into action!

  3. Another way to encourage ripening this late in the season is to prune off all of the top growth that has small tomatoes or blossoms, because once the temps get into the 40s tomatoes won’t set fruit, and the small tomatoes probably won’t reach mature size and ripen, so all that top growth is wasting plant energy. Keep the plants pruned from now on. Anything you can do to keep the plants warm will also help – plastic bags around your tomato cages, frost blankets, piled up hay or straw bales.

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