Pennsylvania!! Unite!!

[Blarneyeggs]

There are some canning pros here, right? I need some advice. I made salsa this year using this recipe http://www.food.com/recipe/wonderful-salsa-9272 and it was really good - although I did make a few changes in the spices and added some lime juice. I processed my pints for 10 minutes just like the recipe instructed. Assuming that diced/pureed tomatoes would be similar because I'm basically just leaving out the peppers and spices, I treated them the same and processed the quarts for about 15 or 20 minutes to account for the bigger jars. NOW, I'm looking at instructions for tomatoes and I'm seeing that quarts need to be processed for 40 minutes! Why would plain tomatoes need to be processed so much longer than tomatoes with peppers and spices? I don't get it and I really don't want to reprocess all of my quarts of tomatoes. I probably will need to anyway because I didn't add the two Tbsp of lemon juice to each jar either, I thought I remembered that tomatoes were acidic enough on their own, but apparently I was wrong about that too.

20 minutes is all they need in a hot water bath. Thats all I do. My grandmother taught me how to can tomatoes and never put lemon juice in there. They are acidic enough. Same for pickling.

. Sweet! I also forgot to add lemon juice this year!

Just want to say Hi to everyone from central PA. I have read through this thread and learned a lot, even though we don't have our chicken yet. DH is working on our coop right now. Hopefully we will have it ready by spring. I think that chicken math already got us, so our planed coop size changes from 3x3 to 4x4 to 4x8 to 4x12 with a 10x30 covered run. You may think that we will get at least 12 chicks. No, the start number will still be 4. They will be our family pets, so we plan to spoil them.

If any one will have pullets available next spring near Altoona - State College area, please let me know. I do love some of dheltzel's breeds (Rhodebars, legbars,black sex links), but sadly she is so far from us. It's lucky that Myers Poultry Farm at South Fork has California greys and Easter Eggers that I really want, but I'm still interested in more good brown or blue egg layers. 

As some of you probably already noticed, I'm a foreigner. So please forgive my poor English. I'm very excited to see so many chicken owners here and would like to say hi.

Welcome! Your English is excellent. The only grammatical mistake I noticed was referring to DHetzel as 'she'. An easy enough mistake to make, (I'm sure you're not the first...) and made me smile.

Dennis, consider it a compliment. .

 

[Blarneyeggs]

My layers.... LOVE these guys (or gals, rather)

 

[TillyPeeps]

Welcome! Your English is excellent. The only grammatical mistake I noticed was referring to DHetzel as 'she'. An easy enough mistake to make, (I'm sure you're not the first...) and made me smile.

Dennis, consider it a compliment. .

Oh, my bad. I automatically assume everyone here is she.

I know some are guys, but I never really remember who is who.

One thing I didn't know about this website is that it'll take hours before my posts ever showed up. Is it because I talked too much?

Or it's the same way for everybody else?

 

[fisherlady]

My layers.... LOVE these guys (or gals, rather)

Your girls are beautiful! And certainly look fit and sassy!
love the little 'saying'....and I raised a perfect example of how true that is!!

 

[Chaos18]

It should say "It's funny, I don't know who's better at eating things off the floor that they probably shouldn't, the dog or the 1 yr old."

 

[fisherlady]

Please pardon the picture overload... got a new camera and love the zoom capability on it...spent some time yesterday playing with it.

 

[fisherlady]

The End!!

 

[dheltzel]

Oh, No! You make me really want to drive 3 hours to get these nice chickens. I really not sure if Myers has pure California Greys or not. That's my dream breed and that's the only place I found them.

The only hatchery to consider for CA Greys is Privett, in New Mexico. Anywhere else and you can't be sure of what you are getting. Privett also sells barred leghorns and Ideal sells "Production blacks", both of those appear to be a lot like the CG's (black barred white egg layer), but only Privett (or people who got their stock from there) has the pure Dresdan line of CG's. If Myers has them, they are almost certainly drop shipping them from Privett. Myers does a lot of that, they are the only large hatchery selling "real" Ameraucanas and Copper Marans.

I got them for making black sexlinks that lay blue eggs. By substituting CG's for the usual Barred Rock hens, I can ensure the progeny will not lay green eggs, but pure blue. I did that this past year with Barred Hollands, but was not totally happy with the BH hens (excellent fertility, but lower egg production than I hoped for). The CG's look and act like leghorns, very flighty compared to BH's and all the other breeds I have. My hope is they are as good a layer as their reputation suggests, and that crossing to my pure black Ameraucanas will clam them down and bulk them up a bit.

I have 2 cockerels (and 22 pullets) and intend to perpetuate the line and make them available to anyone looking for a white egg producer that is not white. When you are ready for chicks in the spring, I'll try to activate the "chicken train" and see if I can get some of them out to you.

 

[emorems0]

It should say "It's funny, I don't know who's better at eating things off the floor that they probably shouldn't, the dog or the 1 yr old."

Or, 1 year old human food - irresistible to dogs. Dog food - irresistible to 1 year olds.

^ can you tell what the current battle is at our house? Lol

 

[Chaos18]

Or, 1 year old human food - irresistible to dogs. Dog food - irresistible to 1 year olds.

^ can you tell what the current battle is at our house? Lol

I'm fighting the same fight.