Getting Our Pickles On...

Another fond childhood memory of mine was eating my Grandmother's homemade dill pickles. My brother and I loved to eat them... and I mean LOVED to eat them. Until last Sunday, I had no clue what it actually took to MAKE dill pickles... and oh the pain-staking process of pickling will make you think twice to decide if you really, REALLY want to make them. Or do you just keep buying those store-bought ones? (I do have to admit that I am HOOKED on Wickles pickles... or anything else Wickles... pickles, okra, the garden mix, you name it!)

With that being said, last Sunday we spent ALL DAY LONG in the kitchen pickling. Pickling cucumbers, pickling banana peppers and pickling jalapeno peppers. We were pickling fools. Yes, we were.

How do you know it's time to pickle? And what to pickle? It all starts with collecting your ingredients...

When the bushes are loaded with the fruits of our labor... it's time to pickle.

I started collecting the ingredients early in the week.

And then I started the cucumber hunt. We did not have any pickling cukes small enough to make whole dill pickles... so I started looking around town for other local farmers cucumbers.

By Saturday night we were in business...

We set up a washtub on the back deck to brine the cukes overnight.

Hubby was a tremendous help chopping up all the dill weed and garlic.

So much to wash...

So much to prep...

Almost ready to start stuffing jars!

And so it begins!

And the final pepper product.

And at 11:00pm we pulled the last jars from the boiled water bath... The sounds of the jar lids "chinking" throughout the evening was music to ours ears as each and every jar sealed. We had a countdown going to see just how many more "chinks" we needed to hear before we went to bed knowing that all 8 quarts of whole pickles, 5 quarts/3 pints of dill pickle spears, 4 quarts/6 pints of pickled banana peppers and 1 pint of jalapeno peppers had properly sealed. Whew! And then we died in the bed from exhaustion...