Pickling and Then Pickling Some More

I know I’ve been growing lax in my updating but here is why: this weekend we bought and dealt with 22 pounds of cucumbers. (Thought we’d learned our lesson from the currants? You should have known better.)

Since our cucumbers aren’t being productive enough that we have enough at any one time to can we went to Schartner’s and bought a box each of small and large pickling cucumbers.

(We also bought their French fries, which they cut and fry right in front of you, delicious with vinegar, and two raspberry bushes which Dad was forced to plant this week).

The cucumbers deteriorate rapidly so canning commenced immediately. We started with a 5 pint batch of bread and butter cucumbers but when we saw how small a dent that made in one of the boxes we decided to double that amount and ended up making 10 jars worth.

The next day we made 6 pints worth of dill slices but still, so many cucumbers! Even after eating cucumber and butter sandwiches for lunch we still had too many. (Well actually they were cucumber and margarine sandwiches since someone is lactose intolerant but they are delicious anyway because I gussy up the marg with generous amounts of chopped herbs like parsley, thyme, chives and rosemary.)

(Bread and butter on the left, dill slices on the right)

We had run out of steam so we resorted to brining the rest of the cucumbers in a large crock. You’ll find out how that worked out in several weeks.

That’s all for now, I’m exhausted just thinking about cucumbers, I may be too traumatized to even eat the pickles.

More Harvesting

Although nothing will beat the bounty that was our wheat harvest (see last post to fully understand sarcasm), we did pick several other things this week.

Snow peas: They suck. It can’t be said any other way, they have barely climbed a foot up the netting and we’ve gotten at most 10 sad little pale green peas so far this year.


Cucumbers: We got three more spiny fat little pickling cucumbers. The plants appear to be picking up steam, I counted at least a dozen little cucumbers getting started.

Squash: We picked our first squash! Although it is very cute, we are slightly disappointed. Mom is sure she bought patty pans but lo and behold we are definitely not getting any patty pans. Who knows if we should blame the greenhouse or the mom’s memory. Next year I’ll make sure she’s wearing strong glasses while selecting seedlings.

And for the grand finale….we harvested our garlic! Mom (thinks she) bought organic garlic last year at a Farmer’s Market and saved it to plant. She did that in mid November (this we’re sure of, she made notes). We made sure to pick the garlic scapes when they appeared (which we used for stir fry) and this week we decided the garlic was ready to harvest. Mom came to this conclusion because some of the stalks had fallen over (and the bottom halfish was brown while the top was still green) and once they fall over they can get mold. So we pulled up about 8 bulbs ranging from medium sized to smallish. We hung them up in a shady spot on the porch to cure so we can save them and use them this fall. Since we go through so much garlic in our cooking we’re thinking of expanding our crop next year.