From a seed packet to a sealed jar: cultivars, sowing calendars, tested processes, and the gear for each phase.https://seedstosauce.com/en-ushttps://seedstosauce.com/sauces/chipotle-adobo/https://seedstosauce.com/sauces/chipotle-adobo/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTSaucehttps://seedstosauce.com/sauces/fermented-habanero-carrot/https://seedstosauce.com/sauces/fermented-habanero-carrot/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTSaucehttps://seedstosauce.com/sauces/genovese-pesto/https://seedstosauce.com/sauces/genovese-pesto/Four cups of basil, a mortar if you have the patience, and nothing that turns black by dinner. Freezes for a year; cannot be canned, ever.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTSaucehttps://seedstosauce.com/sauces/green-zhoug/https://seedstosauce.com/sauces/green-zhoug/Yemeni cilantro-and-serrano relish, raw, ready in fifteen minutes, and violently green. The fastest thing on this site and arguably the most addictive.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTSaucehttps://seedstosauce.com/sauces/louisiana-cayenne/https://seedstosauce.com/sauces/louisiana-cayenne/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTSaucehttps://seedstosauce.com/sauces/romesco/https://seedstosauce.com/sauces/romesco/Charred red peppers, toasted almonds, bread and sherry vinegar. Catalonia's answer to pesto, and the best possible use for a glut of sweet peppers.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTSaucehttps://seedstosauce.com/sauces/salsa-verde/https://seedstosauce.com/sauces/salsa-verde/Blistered tomatillos, serrano, and a fistful of cilantro. Naturally acidic, ready in forty minutes, and it clings to a taco because tomatillos bring their own pectin.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTSaucehttps://seedstosauce.com/sauces/san-marzano-sunday-gravy/https://seedstosauce.com/sauces/san-marzano-sunday-gravy/Twelve pounds of paste tomatoes, three hours, and a food mill instead of a peeling job. The reduction that makes a homegrown tomato taste like the reason you grew it.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTSaucehttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/cayenne/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/cayenne/The chile that dries. Thin-walled, straightforward, 30,000–50,000 SHU — it becomes flakes and powder as easily as it becomes sauce.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/cilantro/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/cilantro/Bolts in a heartbeat and there is nothing you can do about it — so you succession-sow instead of fighting it. Non-negotiable in salsa verde and zhoug.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/genovese-basil/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/genovese-basil/Large-leaf, low-anise Italian basil. Pesto is defined by this cultivar — Thai and lemon basil are good plants and wrong ingredients.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/habanero/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/habanero/The fruity superhot that fermented hot sauce is built on — 100,000–350,000 SHU with an apricot top note that survives three weeks in brine.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/hardneck-garlic/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/hardneck-garlic/Planted in October, pulled in July. Big easy-peeling cloves, plus scapes in June — a free second crop that is itself excellent in a green sauce.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/jalapeno/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/jalapeno/Left to red and cold-smoked it becomes chipotle, which is a completely different and far more useful ingredient than the green pepper on your nachos.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/marconi-pepper/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/marconi-pepper/A long Italian sweet pepper that chars and peels in one piece. Romesco and any red-pepper paste want this, not a supermarket bell.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/nantes-carrot/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/nantes-carrot/The carrot that makes fermented habanero sauce work — sweetness and body without fibre, so the sauce has texture with no thickener and heat that isn't one-dimensional.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/roma-tomato/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/roma-tomato/The determinate paste tomato — it ripens most of its crop in a three-week window, which is a liability for eating and a huge advantage for sauce day.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/san-marzano-tomato/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/san-marzano-tomato/The paste tomato Italian canners actually use — low water, low seed, high pectin. It reduces to sauce in half the time a slicer takes and never tastes thin.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/serrano/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/serrano/Three times a jalapeño's heat with a cleaner, greener, grassier flavour. The correct chile for salsa verde and zhoug, where smoke would be wrong.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/spanish-onion/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/spanish-onion/A long-day storage onion sweet enough to sweat down without scorching. The aromatic base under every tomato sauce on this site — and the earliest sowing on the calendar.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/crops/tomatillo/https://seedstosauce.com/crops/tomatillo/Not a green tomato. A husked, naturally acidic fruit at around pH 3.8 with its own pectin — salsa verde is a tomatillo sauce and there is no substitute.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTCrophttps://seedstosauce.com/guides/blending-texture-and-bottling/https://seedstosauce.com/guides/blending-texture-and-bottling/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGuidehttps://seedstosauce.com/guides/canning-acid-math/https://seedstosauce.com/guides/canning-acid-math/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGuidehttps://seedstosauce.com/guides/container-soil-and-feeding/https://seedstosauce.com/guides/container-soil-and-feeding/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGuidehttps://seedstosauce.com/guides/fermentation-salt-and-safety/https://seedstosauce.com/guides/fermentation-salt-and-safety/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGuidehttps://seedstosauce.com/guides/frost-dates-and-days-to-maturity/https://seedstosauce.com/guides/frost-dates-and-days-to-maturity/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGuidehttps://seedstosauce.com/guides/harvest-timing-and-storage/https://seedstosauce.com/guides/harvest-timing-and-storage/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGuidehttps://seedstosauce.com/guides/seed-starting-light-and-heat/https://seedstosauce.com/guides/seed-starting-light-and-heat/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGuidehttps://seedstosauce.com/gear/canning-gear/https://seedstosauce.com/gear/canning-gear/Which canner for which food is decided by one number, not by preference. Plus the three tools that account for most failed seals.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGearhttps://seedstosauce.com/gear/containers-soil-and-support/https://seedstosauce.com/gear/containers-soil-and-support/Root volume, watering consistency and something strong enough to hold a loaded indeterminate tomato in August. Three problems, three purchases.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGearhttps://seedstosauce.com/gear/fermentation-gear/https://seedstosauce.com/gear/fermentation-gear/Four purchases and one number. Everything that goes wrong in a ferment goes wrong because something floated, or because the salt was measured in spoons.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGearhttps://seedstosauce.com/gear/harvest-tools/https://seedstosauce.com/gear/harvest-tools/Five cheap things. One of them is not optional if you are ever going to touch a habanero, and one of them is the reason your fermentation is safe.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGearhttps://seedstosauce.com/gear/kitchen-and-cookware/https://seedstosauce.com/gear/kitchen-and-cookware/Acid strips bare metal, blenders and mills do opposite jobs, and one of these purchases removes a full hour from every tomato sauce day.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGearhttps://seedstosauce.com/gear/pest-and-disease/https://seedstosauce.com/gear/pest-and-disease/The four problems that actually take a sauce garden, in order of likelihood, and the cheapest intervention that works for each. Exclusion beats chemistry every time.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGearhttps://seedstosauce.com/gear/seed-starting-gear/https://seedstosauce.com/gear/seed-starting-gear/Heat, light, trays and mix. Get these right in February and the rest of the year is maintenance; get them wrong and there is no recovering it in May.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGearhttps://seedstosauce.com/gear/seeds-and-cultivars/https://seedstosauce.com/gear/seeds-and-cultivars/A packet costs five dollars and decides everything downstream. Which specific cultivars the sauces on this site are built on, and why substituting is not a small change.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTGearhttps://seedstosauce.com/kits/balcony-salsa-garden/https://seedstosauce.com/kits/balcony-salsa-garden/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTKithttps://seedstosauce.com/kits/canning-day-setup/https://seedstosauce.com/kits/canning-day-setup/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTKithttps://seedstosauce.com/kits/raised-bed-sauce-tomato-rig/https://seedstosauce.com/kits/raised-bed-sauce-tomato-rig/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.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTKithttps://seedstosauce.com/kits/the-fermentation-bench/https://seedstosauce.com/kits/the-fermentation-bench/Everything to run a real hot sauce ferment, from a gram scale to a calibrated pH meter. Kitchen-only — no growing gear, for people who already have chiles.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTKithttps://seedstosauce.com/kits/windowsill-hot-sauce-start/https://seedstosauce.com/kits/windowsill-hot-sauce-start/Three plants, a shelf, a light and a jar. The smallest setup that genuinely ends in a bottle of fermented hot sauce, for people with no garden at all.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTKit