At 02:16 PM 8/4/00 -0500, peg wolfe wrote: >Greetings from Chicago, all, where it's been a dandy Summer for >chile-growing... South Central Indy-anna is having a bumper year in everything but tomatoes--too cloudy to have many ripe ones. But the chiles? We didn't get any ripe ones to enter in the county fair but in the last two days I've picked about 5 gallons of almost-ripe Red Savina and Habs from the garden. I got another 2 gallons or so of red cayennes, cowhorns and thai dragons. And that heirloom pumpkin patch I put out is going berserk; the danged thing is overrunning the potatoes, onions, cucumbers and is almost to the chiles. I've got baby pumpkins as big as basketballs already with 2.5 months left to grow. Cucumbers? Man, oh, man. The things are out of contorl. The picklers are *huge*; maybe 10 inches and way too big to put a hand around. We've been giving them out all over and most people say they don't want anymore. Last night Pat suggested, seriously, that we walk up the street knocking on doors to see if we can give them away. I suggested doing drive-by cucumberings; just leaving baskets on doorsteps. The cold pickle recipes everyone sent me got homogenized into one recipe and I threw a few--maybe3 or 4--Red Savinas into each 3 gallon crock. Wow. They're not quite Clausens, but they are close and are excellent pickles. With more fire, of course. Thanks to everyone for the help on that. This weekend we'll start dehydrating habs for the next batch of The Brew. The cycle runs Xmas to Xmas. carpo