Build your plan

The references

The parts you
cannot improvise.

Sowing dates, brine percentages, and canning acidity are arithmetic, not opinion. These pages carry the numbers and cite where they come from. Where a claim touches food safety, it points at the NCHFP or a land-grant extension service — not at us.

Planning

A wall calendar marked with sowing and transplant dates beside seed packets

Frost dates and days to maturity: how to build a sowing calendar that works

A hardiness zone is a minimum-temperature map, not a frost-date map. Here is the arithmetic that turns a seed packet into an actual date on your calendar — and where it breaks.

3 cited sources

Seed starting

Pepper seedlings under LED strip lights on a heat mat in 1020 trays

Seed starting: soil temperature and light intensity, not luck

Two numbers decide whether your seedlings are stocky and green or leggy and doomed — soil temperature at germination, and light distance afterward. Everything else is detail.

3 cited sources

Growing

Fabric grow bags being filled with dark potting mix beside a raised bed

Container and bed soil: how much you actually need, and what to feed

The volume arithmetic nobody does before checkout, why a 5-gallon pepper pot dries out in a day in July, and the NPK ratio that decides whether you get fruit or foliage.

3 cited sources

Fermenting

A glass fermentation jar of red chile mash under brine with an airlock

Fermentation: brine percentage, and what actually goes wrong

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.

3 cited sources

Cooking

Tomato sauce being passed through a stainless food mill into a bowl

Texture: milling, blending, straining, and getting it into a bottle

Why a food mill beats a blender for tomato, why a blender beats everything for hot sauce, and how to hit a consistency that actually comes out of a woozy bottle.

2 cited sources

A harvest basket of ripe peppers and paste tomatoes on a kitchen counter

Harvest timing and storage: picking at the right moment, keeping what you can't use

When each crop is actually ready, why "pick it green" costs you most of the flavour, and the three ways to hold a harvest until you have enough for a batch.

3 cited sources

Preserving

A pH meter reading in a jar of red sauce beside canning jars

Canning Acid Math: why pH 4.6 is the only number that matters

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.

4 cited sources