Seed packet → sealed jar
Not a garden blog and not a recipe site — the line between them. Choose what you want in the jar and get back the exact cultivar, the sowing date for your zone, the plant count computed from the recipe's real weights, and the tested process that makes it safe to keep.
Affiliate kit picks
containers setup · affiliate links
Six to eight containers on a sunny deck, and enough tomatillo, serrano and cilantro for a real batch of salsa verde plus a summer of fresh eating.
kitchen setup · affiliate links
The water-bath kit that turns a tomato harvest into a shelf of jars — canner, rack, tools, jars, lids, and a way to check acidity.
raised bed setup · affiliate links
One 4×8 bed, six paste tomatoes with real support, and enough fruit for a winter of Sunday gravy — plus the canning setup to make it shelf-stable.
The pipeline
Most sites hand you half of this. A seed catalog stops at germination; a recipe blog starts at the grocery store. The gap between them is where home crops die and where jars go wrong.
Buy the genetics
The cultivar decides the sauce. Everything downstream is damage control.
Germinate
Soil temperature and light intensity, indoors, weeks before your frost date.
Feed and support
Root volume, nutrition and structure. Where most home crops actually fail.
Defend the crop
Frost, hornworms, aphids, and the fungal pressure that follows a wet July.
Pick at ripeness
Timing, handling, and weighing what you actually got.
Build acid
Brine percentage, anaerobic conditions, and a pH meter you can trust.
Make the sauce
Reduction, texture, and the non-reactive pans that keep tomato tasting like tomato.
Seal the year
Tested processes, correct headspace, and jars that are still good next March.
Every phase has real, buyable gear attached — and a disclosure on the page saying we get paid when you use it. See the gear catalog →
The Plan Builder
Pick a sauce, your USDA zone, and whether you're working a windowsill or a raised bed. It computes the indoor sowing date, the transplant date, the first-harvest window, how many plants the recipe's weights actually require, how much potting mix that is in bags, how many jars you'll fill — and lays the whole shopping list out in the order you'll need it.
It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on a server, and there is no account to make.
Build your plan →How hot is hot
Start here
Three weeks in a 3% brine turns raw habanero heat into something layered and sour, and carrot gives it body and colour with no thickener. The reference build for a homegrown hot sauce.
Dried cayenne softened in hot water, a charred sweet Marconi for body, toasted coriander, cumin and caraway, garlic, lemon and olive oil. The North African chile paste, made from two pepper plants you already grow.
Zhoug, also spelled s'hug or zhug, is a Yemeni cilantro-and-serrano relish. Raw, ready in fifteen minutes, and violently green. The fastest thing on this site and arguably the most addictive.
Three ingredients — cayenne, salt, vinegar — and four weeks of patience. The thin, sharp, pourable hot sauce that goes on everything and gets better in the bottle.
Red jalapeños, eight hours of cold smoke, then a braise in a dark ancho-and-vinegar sauce. The single most useful jar in a kitchen.
Red jalapeños and a whole head of garlic, fermented as a 2.5% salt mash for a week, then blended with vinegar and a little sugar and simmered thick. Homemade sriracha that tastes like chile first and garlic second.
How this site behaves
Field guides
Match pepper type, maturity window, and fruit color to your growing season and the sauce in the jar.
Salt is a percentage of weight, not a number of spoons. How to calculate it, why anaerobic matters more than sterile, and how to tell kahm yeast from mould without guessing.
The single line that separates a water-bath jar from a pressure-canner jar, why you cannot taste it, and what tomatoes do that makes them the most dangerous ingredient in a home kitchen.
It starts on a specific date, in a tray, under a light, months before anyone is thinking about sauce. Pick the jar you want at the end of it and we'll tell you what day to start.
Build your plan →
