Time to make pickles and dilly beans

Today is pickle day. Hopefully, there will be more pickling days, but we will have to see how the pickle vines – some might call them cucumbers – do in the next few weeks. Like everything in the garden, there is a long build-up to seeing fruit and then a relatively short harvest. It seems like forever – planting and weeding and watering and watching – and then shortly after you see a few blossoms, the fruit is there. Then shortly after that, it’s gone. Tomatoes and peppers are a bit of an exception. They take longer from blossoms to mature fruit and the season last a good while. But the radishes, spinach, lettuce, peas, beans, and cucumbers explode with fruit and then it’s over.

Ready for canning

Now that the cucumbers are here, we will do some canning. The beans are slowing down, but we have saved a few pounds of them to can with the pickles. We will use the same pickling juice for the beans. I love dilly beans. Not sure where or when I had my first ones, but I am looking forward to making these again this year. The Derby bush beans have yielded beautiful long straight beans that will be ideal for putting in jars. And this year’s pickles are clearly better than what we got last year already, so these should be good, too.

Last summer was hot and unusually dry. The lawn lost almost all of its green color and actually died in large patches. We kept the garden barely alive by watering with the soaker hose, but the weather clearly made this a struggle. So far this year has been a little better, but still a bit dry for the past month or so. We planted the squash and cucumbers in between the tomato plants and so far this has working out pretty well although it is a bit tricky finding a place to step.

We planted two varieties of cucumbers: Sassy Hybrid and Miss Pickler “Pioneer”. I’m not sure at this point which is which, but everything we have picked so far looks great.