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...

Garden Clean-Up

Saturday was another productive day on Wilsons Farms complete with lots of sunshine! After all the rain we have had in the past week or so, the plants were soaking in the sunshine like no tomorrow. Hubby kept telling me that the plants were growing before our eyes... and how they were bigger in the afternoon from when we first got in the garden that morning.

As you can see there are little squash coming in...



The cilantro is double in height now!



Most of our day was spent working in the garden. Hubby and I both spent a lot of time off and on hand weeding and hoeing the long rows. Again, with all of the rain we had, it is no surprise the amount of weeds we have too!







We also strategically dusted those plants still showing evidence of worms or bugs. We re-applied the deer/varmint prevention liquid to the plotsaver perimeter fence. And we set up our strings for the cucumber plants to "run" up!





Next up was thinning out the corn stalks... we planted 3-5 seeds in each hole back during the planting weekend in early May. They all seem to have made it to corn stalks! So we cut out the smaller ones to make more rooms for the best 1-2...





"BJ" came over to pitch in and he bush-hogged the overgrown lower bottom plot for us... this is where our honey bees are located. The white clover was pretty much dried-up so it was time to cut it.



Later in the day, "BJ" and Hubby did some scraping/leveling of one section of our driveway... This section was pretty eroded from all of the vehicles going over it in the past year.



We also planted more sweet corn... picked up a dollars worth at the local feed store. This will come in a month after our current planting.





All in all, the garden is looking fabulous!

Driving Posts & Cutting Bamboo & Work Bench Construction- Part 3!

One of the things us farmers do is check the weather. And we check it often. The local forecast has been calling for storms on this day since mid-this-past-week. As of this morning, the weather forecast was showing thunderstorms starting around 2-3pm. So the whole day is planned around that event happening in that time slot.... We started out heading to the closest metropolis, LaGrange for garden supplies and workshop materials... plus a trip to the grocery store. Home by late morning, on farm working by noon hour.

First off, Hubby went ahead and drove some new posts for me into the ground in/outside the run between my 2 rows of cucumbers. I am eventually going to build a tee-pee formation rack system up to these posts for my cucumbers to run up. But, the cuke plants are not quite big enough to starting "running" yet... so we have a little time before we have to construct it.





After all that manual labor of post-driving and once "BJ" arrived, Hubby retired to the barn out of the blazing hot sun... And Hubby and "BJ" were nice enough to start off by making me some stakes as requested. 18 inch long rebar pieces heated up and bent into a "J" formation for me to drive into the ground. I could tell they really enjoyed this task.











Once the stakes cooled down, I took them out to the garden and drove them into the dirt to pull the baling twine down closer to the pole bean plants. This will get them close enough in hoping the rain today would help the plants grow up and grab onto/run up the twine!





I did remember to pick up a few more tomato cages today while we were at the home improvement store... so I set those up on my five large tomato plants.



It was blazing hot today, but the boys still continued on with their welding and cutting today on the work bench.







This is going to be one heckuva work bench I tell ya!

I forgot to mention that "BJ" brought me some bamboo today. I am very excited to make some posts, stakes, etc. out of this natural homegrown plant/tree!
Here is what it looked like BEFORE I got a hold of it:



And this is the AFTER photo... after I ninja-fied it w/ an old dirty machete!