My pickle journey began on a crisp January day this year. I was flipping though Annie’s Heirloom Seed Catalogue, while fantasizing about warm weather and all the stuff I wanted to grow in the garden.
Me: “Hey! We could grow corn and make our own popcorn!!”
El-D Squidward: “No. The deer will eat it.”
Me: “Then we need to plant enough for the deer to eat too! What could be better than homegrown popcorn!?”
El-D Squidward: “Being dead…or anything else.” (ok, maybe he didn’t say that part exactly, but the sentiment was expressed in the look he gave me.)
I continued flipping pages in the catalogue and came to the page with cucumbers. Homemade pickles! I kept this thought to myself, lest I be told a plague of cucumber-eating locust were expected this year.
I pondered pickles for few months, then ordered the seeds for Boston Pickling Cucumbers. The date was March 24th.
I planted them on May 6th. Little fuzzy plants began pulling themselves out of the ground a few weeks later.
El-D saw them coming up and built them a fancy trellis. On May 11th it occurred to me that I really needed to be growing dill if I was going to make pickles, so I planted some.
As the cucumber blossoms started turning into fruit, I realized that this pickle thing might acutally happen. The search for recipes began in earnest. I watched the Good Eats episode on pickle making as part of my research because Alton Brown is THE MAN.
After painstaking research, I finally decided on Curbstone Valley Farm’s Classic Dill Pickle recipe. Four stores later, I had managed to acquire almost all the ingredients. (Where the heck does one find juniper berries??).
Today, pickle preparation began. Today alone was a 5 hour labor of love.
I have the scalded skin to show for it. Seven months after the pickle idea popped into my head, I have this…
<cue angels singing here>
Sing it with me y’all!
…and now I only have three weeks to wait. This batch will be ready August 2. *sigh*
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July 12, 2016 at 8:38 pm
Cathy
gurllllll that is AWSOME… we should have a pickle party and you can feed us pickles !!
July 14, 2016 at 8:48 pm
Lunar Euphoria
The opening of the first pickle jar needs to be an event for sure. If I throw a pickle party will people bring me presents?
July 13, 2016 at 7:07 am
skatturcast
Bread n Butter pickles! We need Bread n Butter! Looks awesome
July 14, 2016 at 8:53 pm
Lunar Euphoria
I have a bread and butter recipe – that’s the next batch. After that if the plant is still producing it will be hot and spicy!
There are also a round of beets coming up that I’m thinking about pickling. I’ll have a pantry packed with pickles.
July 13, 2016 at 7:22 pm
Dana
Pickle making is a huge deal! ESPECIALLY when you grow the cucumbers yourself. I made 40lbs of homemade pickles in a teeny-tiny apartment about 8 years ago and it nearly killed me… and that was using farm-bought produce. NOT cucumbers I had nursed and nurtured since they were fuzzy flowers! I admire your patience, resilience, and bravery.
July 14, 2016 at 9:48 pm
Lunar Euphoria
40 lbs of pickles?? You can’t just drop a comment like that and walk away without giving details! What was the occasion? What kind of pickles? Did you give them away? Sell them? Rent a second apartment to store them in?? Were they everything you’d hoped they would be? (I’m somewhat anxious about mine — I have such high hopes for them! What if I did all this work and invite everyone over for a pickle party and they are horrible?)
And yes. Pickling is not for the faint of heart. It’s serious! I’d almost rather have a pickle-ING party than a pickle party (or both) so pickle party people ponder the pickle production process properly.
July 15, 2016 at 12:15 am
Dana
Haha, there was no special occasion, aside from the fact that I was just handed down my mother-in-law’s secret pickle recipe and felt that I owed it to her to make a SCHWACK of pickles to prove how grateful I was to learn her process. 😉
When I first met her, she gave me a jar of her pickles, which I ate in about a day. She totally thought I was pregnant and kept giving me new jars of pickles to feed my ‘cravings’, only to find out a year or so later that nope, I wasn’t pregnant, but I sure liked pickles! HAHA!
I didn’t give ANY away. We ate them all (over the course of a year-ish, I believe.) We had them stored everywhere, too– 40lbs of pickles definitely takes up room in a tiny apartment kitchen, but we ate them fast…
I’m sure your pickles will be delicious! Let us know how the pickle party goes and yes- next year plan a picklING party! xo
July 15, 2016 at 9:14 pm
Lunar Euphoria
Oh! Cravings and secret recipes, drama and intrigue…great story! I’m glad I asked.
At the rate the garden is going, I may not need to wait until next year for a picklING party — there are dozens of baby cucumbers growing up and bunches of yellow blooms on the vines still…and I just pulled the first two ripe jalapenos off the pepper plant…and the beets are getting bigger and bigger….and there are okra to think about…and there’s a pickle recipe I want to try with champagne vinegar and pear tomatoes…and…