empties - I keep all my jars - full and empty - on 2 metal storage racks in my basement. They are all in boxes - I have post it notes on them noting the contents. When the box is empty, the post it note disappears. As I empty jars, I fill them into the empty slots of the partially full boxes. I have an empty box that is my "catch bin" - as empty jars come out of the dishwasher, they go into the "catch bin" box. Then, for instance, when I go get a pint jar of marinara, when I pull the full jar out, I grab an empty pint jar from the catch basin box and put it in it's slot. When I want to can something, I can just go to the basement, pull out a full box of empties. The empties are clean, so I can just warm them in my canning pot. Though if it's been a while and they've gotten dusty, I'll pop them in my dishwasher on the rinse and hold cycle. One "advantage" to my system is that like items are always together. In each box is only marinara, or chicken, or applesauce. One "disadvantage" is that I could end up with a lot of boxes with only 1 or 2 full jars. That becomes and "issue" in Aug/Sept when canning is in full swing and I really need my empties. At that point, I'll combine some boxes - peaches and pears in the same box, or all the pickles in one box.

I just sent off a note to Big Lots asking about canning jars. Apparently they go by local store demand. If they have skids full, and these sit for more than a few months of canning season, they won't send off any the next year apparently. I suggest that if your local Big Lots has no jars, send off a note to them through their web site. I don't mind using a jar over, but to just buy used old jars, gives me another issue that I must carefully inspect each one, for cracks, chips, and most importantly heat stress. The heat stress can only be done with a polariscope I believe, unless you just want to fill a jar with hot water and run it through a whole canning process to see if it will crack. Its like buying a pig in a poke, or that 'infamous' box of chocolates (Forrest Gump)! Older jars over about 4-5 years are actually pints and quarts, whereas todays are in liters.

Everyone who writes about how to make compost emphasizes the need for more browns than greens, and I've always just ignored that for the most part. The plain, basic truth is that whatever organic material you pile up on the ground eventually will decompose, so I just don't worry or fret about whether I had added enough browns or greens or whatever in any given week or month. Over time, it will average out and, even if it doesn't, I'm going to get compost anyway. With the thousand-and-one things that a gardener has to worry about in a year, the ratio of greens to browns just doesn't rank high on my list. One reason is that I watched my grandfather do sheet composting in the 1960s/70s and he mostly had greens so that is what he used. They decomposed just fine. My dad had a compost bin in the corner of our backyard in the 1970s/80s and it was pretty much the same way. He mostly had browns only in fall when leaves were falling or when he had cornstalks to add to his pile. The rest of the year he mostly had greens. He got compost too. I suppose it depends on how quickly a person wants compost, but mostly to me, it is a matter of doing what is the most easy and most simple. I stay really busy in the gardening season maintaining a garden that is far too large for a small family and then putting up the excess harvest via canning, freezing, dehydrating and an occasional batch of fermentation. I simply don't have time to worry about what percentage of browns went on the pile and what percentage of greens went on the pile. Heck, I'm just excited when something makes it out of the garden and onto the pile in summer. (More about that in a minute.) It is a moot point as far as I'm concerned because I will eventually get compost regardless. Throughout the growing season I generally (but not always) throw "stuff" on whichever of my five piles is closest to where I am working at the moment. Both of my big garden plots have smallish compost piles inside of them, but my biggest pile sits across the driveway from my big garden. That pile generally runs about 30-40' long, about 8' wide, and the height varies wildly from a foot or so tall in late winter when I am about to remove finished compost from it, to 6-8' tall in autumn when I am cleaning out the garden plots and piling spent plants on the pile. From that pile, I removed about 30 large wheelbarrow loads of compost in the late winter through early spring of 2014, adding several inches to most of my raised beds. Guess what? I got all of that from just throwing stuff on top of the pile, only watering it if a wildfire was approaching (so my compost pile wouldn't burn up if the fire got there), and never turning it. I never even once asked myself if I had enough browns or enough greens. So, clearly I am a very laid-back, casual compost maker who just ignores the rules and gets lots of compost anyhow. My method is not for everyone. If my Type A husband was a gardener, my "throw it on the pile and go work elsewhere" approach would make him crazy. He'd be out there carefully layering browns and greens in the right proportions so he could be in total control of everything that was happening. Luckily for me, he is not a gardener, so I can be a lazy compost maker without driving him up the wall. My advice is to just not worry and fret about browns and greens too much---it all evens out over time. That doesn't mean that I completely ignore the fact that a compost pile makes compost faster if it has both browns and greens---it just means that I accept that a more laid-back approach with less worrying about the browns/greens still gives me compost. Organic animal feeds exist, but are not necessarily easy to find and even if you find them, they are significantly more expensive. I do use the manure. I use it on a compost pile that is filling in an eroded gully that needed to be filled in. I just don't use it in the garden areas. I could use it in the garden merely by testing it, but I don't have to take that step because I make plenty of compost on the piles that don't get the manure. I'll link an article that tells you how to do the bioassay to determine if your compost is free and clear of herbicide residues or, at least, if they are at such a low level that they don't kill your plants. Clearly I am a rule breaker. Weeds go on and in all my compost piles despite all the garden writers who insist that a person shouldn't put them there. There is a very clear reason for that. Many of the plants we consider weeds are dynamic accumulators that accumulate certain minerals in them that may be lacking in your soil overall. Often they do this by sending roots down very deeply to reach those minerals far beneath the surface of the soil. It is one way that nature uses to pull those nutrients up to the upper layer of the ground (inside the weeds that accumulate them) so they can be recycled into the top soil for use. If I wasn't pulling those weeds and composting them, the accumulated minerals would just be released into the soil when the weed died and decomposed. It is smarter to only put weeds on the compost pile if they haven't gone to seed, but as long as your pile gets hot enough long enough, the heat will decompose most of the weed seeds. I mulch my garden heavily after the plants are up and growing, so I really don't get all that many weeds from compost anyhow. So, obviously I just go ahead and toss weeds on the compost pile even if they have gone to seed. In fact, when I am in the garden weeding and I pull weeds, I usually lay them down right on top of the mulch that covers all my raised beds and my garden paths. In our heat and sunlight, they are going to turn brown and dead in a day or so and they will decompose right there in place, feeding the plants and enriching the soil as they break down. To me, this is the easiest way to compost. Pull the weed, lay it on top of the ground, let it break down. That's 100 times more efficient than pulling the weed, putting it in a bucket, eventually filling a bucket, carrying it to the compost pile, dumping it on the pile, letting it decompose for a few months and then coming back to the pile, filling up buckets with compost, and carrying the compost to the garden to put it right back in the general area from which the weeds originally were removed. I just cut out a lot of that lugging of buckets of stuff out of the garden and to the pile and then back again. So, do you think I'm insane? I am doing what works for me in my garden, my soil, my weather and climate and my growing and composting conditions. When I do my main cleaning up of the garden in fall, all the spent plants do get hauled out to the big compost pile, but in the growing season, the weeds become instant mulch once they are pulled. My favorite way to make compost doesn't even involve a compost pile. It involves mulch. In the springtime, as I plant, I put about a 1/2-1" layer of finished compost on top of the beds once transplants have been planted or once seeds have sprouted and are growing. Then I add mulch, which early is the season normally is leaves I gathered in the fall by running over them with the lawnmower and chopping them up. As the season goes on and the weather warms and we are mowing the yard (2-3 acres but not all of it gets mowed every week because we wait for the seasonal wildflowers in the pasture to set seed before we mow them), I add layers of grass clippings to the top layer of mulch. I start out with 1/2-1" of mulch on beds with small plants in them, and keep adding more layers of mulch as the plants grow. My goal is to have 3-4" of mulch on top of all the growing beds before the real summer heat arrives. Of course, heat decomposes my mulch, and surprisingly fast some years, so every week when we mow, I add mulch to the beds. Now, here's where it gets fun. After all the plants are out of the beds in the fall, I can sit there with my trowel and work that compost into the garden bed. Or, I can just keep layering on more and more mulch and let it overwinter on top of the ground. (With this approach, the beds are very well mulched so that they don't sprout winter weeds. Some years I do this.) In the years where I work the mulch into the soil in the fall, I generally then sow a cold-hardy cover crop which will prevent erosion and which will fill up the space so there's nowhere for winter weeds to sprout. My pathways are mulched in the same manner. By late fall or early winter, all the pathway mulch has decomposed and is a lovely, rich, humusy compost. I can use my compost scoop to scoop up the compost from the paths and pour it onto the adjacent raised beds. Isn't that really efficient? I find it much more enjoyable to kneel on my kneeling pad with a compost scoop in my hand moving compost a couple of feet from the pathways to the beds than to haul big loads of compost one wheelbarrow load at a time from a more distant compost pile to the garden. To me, it is all about finding the most efficient way that works for a specific person in their garden with their conditions and their set-up. This is what works for me. Tree trimmings from trees are fine to use as long as the trees haven't been treated with anything that you wouldn't want to put into a compost pile or garden. Be sure you don't take any part of a tree that was treated with a stumpkiller because some of the stumpkiller herbicides contain picloram or other similar herbicides that can persist after composting. Plants destroyed by SVBs shouldn't be composted unless you've already gone through the stems and removed the grubs. This is because they may crawl into the soil beneath the compost pile and overwinter there. The last thing you want is for them to overwinter in or beneath your pile where they then can emerge and destroy your plants the following year. With most pests, though, I don't give it a second thought. It is not as if the pests in my garden do not exist everywhere else outside the garden. There are just as many pests in the fields, the forest, the pastures, the yard, the flower beds, etc. A hot compost pile will kill pretty much any pests in plants put onto the pile anyhow, and I can assure you that a fresh bunch of new pests will show up in and around your garden every year no matter what you do. Your garden is an ecosystem and every single thing in it either eats something or is eaten by something. You'll never have a pest-free garden. It simply isn't realistic. Many insects perform beneficial functions in a garden, and I'd say that maybe 1-3% of the insects I see in my garden cause all the trouble. The remaining 97-99% are beneficial. So, as you might guess, there's not many insects that I get very wound up about. My worst pests are grasshoppers, which are simply horrendous some years but then not a big problem at all most years. Their population cycles up and down naturally, and when we are at an "up" point in the cycle, it helps to remind myself that the up years are always followed by down years. Don't overthink composting and don't worry too much about what you do or don't put on your compost pile. In the plainest, simplest terms, anything and everything that was once living matter will indeed decompose, and it will decompose with no help from us. It just might decompose more slowly without human intervention, but it will decompose. Lots of people go to extreme lengths to create compost piles that are "just so" and that is fine if it is what they want to do. I just don't find myself wanting to put huge amounts of effort into creating a perfect compost pile when I know imperfect ones decompose just as well. : ) When we moved here, we bought a piece of land that was a little over 14 acres. About 3 or 4 acres were open grassland and about 10 - 11 acres were woodland. Guess where the best soil was? Our grassland was mostly red, dense, heavily-compacted clay. I mean flower pot clay. If I ever give up gardening, I could dig red clay from our land and make flower pots all day long. It is that dense and that bad. When we first moved here, there was no drainage and puddles could stand for weeks and weeks after a thunderstorm. However bad the soil was, there are prairie grasses and forbs (and even a few cacti) that are adapted to grow in this kind of soil and they grew in it just fine. However, in order to grow the edible plants and ornamental plants that I wanted to grow, it was essential that I improve the soil where they would grow, and adding organic matter, including compost, to that soil was the quickest way to improve it. Down in our woodland areas, by contrast, the soil was dark brown, rich, humusy, and composed of beautiful pieces (in all sizes) of materials that were decomposing on their own---autumn leaves, tree twigs, limbs, bark, and even trunks. There were decaying plants of all kinds, including vines, groundcovers, shade-tolerant gtasses and wildflowers, etc. and also the decomposing bodies of insects, reptiles, small animals, sometimes large animals, etc. No one goes into the woods and piles up greens and browns, so everything just lies there where it fell and it all decomposes. Every since we moved here, my goal has been to recreate that forest floor, with its rich, humusy soil in my garden plots. It is likely that I'll never have soil in my garden that is as good as the soil in my woodland, but that won't stop me from trying to improve that soil. I just try to do it in the easiest, simplest way possible. Making compost and amending soil isn't rocket science. If we stand still, look around us and observe nature in action, we'll see that Mother Nature functions just fine without our intervention. There are some gardening tasks I put tons of effort into, but composting isn't one of them. For me, it is about picking my battles and choosing to spend my gardening hours in ways I enjoy the most. When we moved here, I already was a lifelong gardener who was fortunate to grow up not only in a gardening family with a huge extended family of gardeners, but also in a neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s where most of our neighbors had veggie gardens, fruit trees, berry brambles or bushes, herbs, flowers, etc. So, I grew up knowing all the gardening "rules", so to speak. By the time we moved here, I was about to turn 40 and I was tired of following all the rules, so I just threw away the rulebook and did what worked best for me. It is not a decision I regret. It is smart to read and research and see what works and why, what is recommended and what isn't, etc. but try to avoid worrying too much about what you can or can't do or should or shouldn't do. The fact is that no matter what you do, you're likely to have a beautiful and productive garden anyway. When you first start gardening, whether you're growing grass, ornamental plants, trees, shrubs, vines, ground covers, or edible plants, you wan to do everything just exactly right. The longer I garden, though, the more I understand that there is not just one way to do things---there are many ways. What works for one person might not work for another. What works for a person one year in certain weather conditions might not work nearly as well the next year with drastically different conditions. You can work really hard at making compost, or you can just pile stuff up and let it rot. However you choose to do it, don't box yourself in to a certain way and decide it is the only way---there are many ways. Happy Gardening, Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: How To Test For Herbicide Carryover

The bulk bins at the local health food and grocery stores here have at least a dozen different kinds of beans each, including some pretty obscure ones - I would just cruise down the aisle with a handful of bags, picking up a cup or so of each. Don't stress about having the colors "matching", I think the variety of bean colors is just so pretty all in their natural glory. Green lentils (which are sort of olivey in color), black (aka turtle) beans, pinto beans (red and white splotched), garbanzos, pink beans, pea beans (white with a brown dot), tiny black lentils, mung beans (sometimes an interesting shade of lime-ish green), Great Northern beans (white speckled with red-brown), navy beans (tiny and bright white), green and yellow split peas, dried limas (baby and large), black-eyed peas, small red beans, yellow-eye beans, fava beans... I could go on and on! Some garden centers have jars of heirloom beans for people to plant but there's no reason why you can't put them into a bean jar. A smaller, "partner" jar with layers of rice could also look nice - there are so many rices besides just ordinary white and brown out there, in different grain sizes, that it would make a very charming accessory! Japanese "forbidden" rice is just beautiful shiny black or sometimes burgundy kernels, Asian red rice, wild rice, golden rice, one I can't remember the name of but is naturally a lovely shade of green, arborio types for their pretty pearl-like round shape, basmati's long, slim kernels... Make sure to bury several bay leaves in decorative jars containing beans, rice and other foodstuffs to keep out the bugs. Health food stores have bay leaves in bulk jars, sold by the ounce - it's just crazy to buy the little jars for $4 that have maybe 10 leaves in it when a stop at the local health food store will get you at least that many for about 25 cents. (Side note speaking of bay leaves: Turkish bay and California bay are two different species with much different flavors. California bay is actually a type of eucalyptus and to my palate has faint overtones of Vicks Vapo-Rub, while Turkish bay is the real bay laurel and has a light, fresh flavor. Indian bay is rare in this country but it is yet another species, with a slightly cinnamony flavor.) Of course, if you are lucky enough to have access to live bay laurel trees, pick leaves from there but make sure they are well dried - they should snap cleanly when bent, not bend.