I have a relative, who shall remain nameless, who gardens but has a naughty little habit. He cannot resist bringing back seeds, roots, and cuttings from his travels, even if his travels are out of the country. He tends to know what he's doing, and refrains from bringing back known noxious plants, but I can't help wondering if the next kudzu lurks in his backyard. As nervous as his habit makes me, he does get a lot of interesting plants for no money (if one ignores the airfare for the moment). This is something any gardener can appreciate.

As much as we all enjoy perusing our favorite seed catalogs, I do wince every year as I see how much I shell out for seeds. To make matters worse, one often ends up with more seeds of a certain type than could reasonably be used in a hundred years. Who really needs or wants two hundred basil plants? It makes a lot more sense to share seeds, taking a little of this and that from friends in exchange for your own surplus.

I went looking for a national seed exchange that could help me find free seeds for interesting plants that are suitable for my region. What I discovered is that there are more seed exchanges that one can count, but none of them are very useful. It's more like an eBay-esque free for all, minus the bidding. Sites such as GardenWeb do a decent job of breaking it down by region and plant. BlossomSwap offers both national and botanical categories, as well. The Emily Compost seed exchange scores points for a catchy name. There are numerous, almost countless, other seed and plant exchange sites, but they all seem to suffer from the same limitations:

1. A surplus of things you don't want - the same plants you already have that produce seeds by the ton.


2. Mandatory registration, which means to reach a wide audience, one would have to register and monitor a lot of different seed exchange communities.


3. A complete absence of any of the trappings of the modern Web, such as decent searching, tagging of posts to allow easy sorting, or RSS feeds for posts with certain keywords or tags.

If you're a Web developer, gardener, and love seed exchanges, perhaps this could be your next project. But this may just be one of those instances where the Web, as nifty and handy as we all find it, really cannot replace a local community of gardeners. It's a lot of fun trading seeds and plants with neighbors and people in the community outside your door. See a plant you like in someone's yard? Use it as an opportunity to meet someone new and ask for some seeds or a cutting.

Mary Appelhof's Worms Eat My Garbage is a classic instructional book on home vermiculture (worm composting). A revised and updated revision is available for free download from EcoBrain, we have no idea for how long. You can find it here, where you'll see their other vermiculture books.

EcoBrain's big idea is that selling green books as downloads offers the dual benefit of convenience and a lessened impact on the environment. They have a great selection of books for gardeners, so if they get you to browse around a little before or after your free download, you've made their generosity make sense.

Whether you grow your own produce or buy it from a CSA or a farmer's market, you probably suffer from the same feast/famine cycle in terms of produce. In summer, you might have 39 zucchini, 50 pounds of tomatoes, and a fridge full of greens, but in winter you're lucky to have two wretched hothouse tomatoes that are worth using. What to do?

The most obvious way to smooth out this produce hump would be to preserve the food somehow, and many people do this, of course. I've noticed, however, that of the three most common methods for preserving food - drying, freezing, and canning - the last one tends to limp behind the others, particularly in the younger crowd. The reasons for this are obvious, perhaps. It takes lots of boiling water, jars, lids, and rings, and there are myriad rules and tables for how this or that should be canned so you don't poison your family. Freezing is by comparison fast and easy: buy a box of bags and get to work. Drying is easy, too, but not everything can be dried, and even if some fruit or vegetable can be dried, that doesn't mean you want tons of it.

Canning has a few advantages over its two peers. For one, you can put an enormous amount of food into very few jars, as you literally pack it in and remove any air. There's also the fact that some foods don't freeze well (salsa, for one, turns to water), and even if they do, if you want to eat in 15 minutes and haven't planned ahead, you've got an iceberg on your counter. Then there's freezer burn, which limits how long one should keep food in that state. Something few consider is the fact that freezers are energy-intensive appliances, doing what they do. As we learned after an intense ice storm last winter, they also don't do you much good when your power goes out for more than 24 hours.

One of the problems with canning is that it can be confusing, because everyone adds slight variations to the basic rules, and these variations lead to holy wars between generations sometimes. Traditional sources such as The Joy of Cooking (the old one, not the new Joy) are wonderful to read, but they make it sound like an arcane science, while general purpose cookbooks such as Better Homes and Gardens will get you pretty far, but don't handle exceptions or odd cases very well.

Fortunately, there are some very good websites where skilled canners and scientists share common-sense and straightforward information. If you buy anything made by Ball, you'll find the address www.freshpreserving.com somewhere on the box. Despite the pretty annoying Flash animation entry page, it's a decent site, but assumes that you want to use their spice packs and such. Not for me. If you search the Web for 'home canning,' the first result is typically www.homecanning.com, which will just lead you to the aforementioned site.

The best resource I've found is the National Center for Home Food Preservation, an agency created by the USDA's Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service. That's a fancy way of saying that it pulls together information from the various land-grant university research and extension services. What this means for the canner is that it's the latest research, presented in a neutral and endorsement-free environment. The publication section of their site offers clear choices based on what one is canning, as well as information on other food preservation methods, including freezing, fermentation, storing, curing, etc. I used "Guide 3, Selecting, Preparing, and Canning Tomatoes and Tomato Products" with great success today, and was glad to find a definitive answer to my questions about the need to acidify tomatoes, and how to do so.

The picture at the start of this post shows last night's canning project, okra pickles. Two years ago, I thought okra was the devil's food and wouldn't have eaten it other than in gumbo, where other flavors and textures dominate. I now realize I wasted many decades of my life with such silliness, and am committed to undoing that sin. I've never pickled anything, let alone okra, so this was an experiment. I have the remains that wouldn't fill the last jar in the fridge and sampled them today. Fantastic! If you're curious, the red color comes from the cayenne and red okra, which was about 30% of the mix.

I can hardly wait to crack some of my canned food in the depths of winter and enjoy my sun in a jar.