Q: Is there anything I can do with a giant zucchini? I always end up with at least one that “got away”.
Depending on how big, you can still make use of it. Summer squash, including zucchini, develop hard seeds fairly quickly, giving them an unpleasant mouth feel. If the seeds are hard, but the flesh isn’t bitter, you could use it for zucchini bread or any recipe that calls for shredded zucchini. Usually this works for slightly overgrown fruit.
If your zucchini is the size of a man’s torso, I recommend tossing it into the compost pile.
Q: Every year, we get a lot of tomatoes from our garden, which I will process into salsa, catsup, pasta sauce, and crushed tomatoes. I really like the flavor of the salsa and catsup, but the pasta sauce and crushed tomatoes are too tart for my taste. I know that I can’t skip adding either lemon juice or citric acid to the jars, but is there some way I can make plain tomatoes more palatable?
Adding acid to home-canned tomatoes is an essential safety step and definitely shouldn’t be skipped. Salsas and catsup recipes usually call for added acid in the form of either vinegar or lemon/lime juice. In the case of crushed tomatoes or plain pasta sauce, the added acid can result in an unpleasant level of tartness, as you have discovered. Fortunately, there’s a way around this that won’t compromise safety.
When reheating the sauce or tomatoes, add ¼ teaspoon of baking soda to the pot. Expect some foaming as the baking soda neutralizes the acid, releasing carbon dioxide gas. Once the foaming has subsided, taste the sauce and, if it’s still too tart, add another ¼ teaspoon of baking soda. Repeat this process until the sauce is no longer sour. Don’t add too much baking soda at one time or your stove will look like a kid’s volcano science fair project. (Yes, I learned this the hard way.)
Q: When can I plant winter vegetables? I would also like to plant some cool-weather flowers (pansies).
I would hold off on planting any cool-weather flowers or crops until mid or late November if you are in Southern California. Even though there’s “pumpkin spice” everything in the stores, we must resign ourselves to a few more weeks of possible 100-plus degree weather. This applies to both winter vegetables such as kale, lettuce, cilantro, arugula, and root crops as well as pansies, stock, snapdragons, and ornamental kale. I also like to wait until the bunnies go into hibernation before planting out pansies. Before I knew better, I planted 2 flats of pansies in my garden only to find that the bunnies had eaten every last one of them overnight.
Los Angeles County
mglosangeleshelpline@ucdavis.edu; 626-586-1988; http://celosangeles.ucanr.edu/UC_Master_Gardener_Program/
Orange County
ucceocmghotline@ucanr.edu; http://mgorange.ucanr.edu/
Riverside County
anrmgriverside@ucanr.edu; 951-955-0170; https://ucanr.edu/sites/RiversideMG/
San Bernardino County
mgsanbern@ucanr.edu; 909-387-2182; http://mgsb.ucanr.edu