Amish 7-Day Sweet Pickles

With the combination of rain and hot weather we’ve been getting, it’s been a stellar year for cucumbers. So far, we’ve harvested 31 lbs. of cukes from our two hills of Little Leaf H-19 (seeds purchased from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in 2012), and the vines are still going strong. It’s pickle-making time! I dedicated…

The Cost of Canning

After a sweaty afternoon spent laboring over pots of boiling water and green beans, I can’t help but ask myself: is it worth it? Is it worth a couple of hours on my feet–fingertips turning to prunes as they’re plunged repeatedly into the rinsing water–to turn 6 1/2 pounds of fresh beans into 5 quarts of canned ones? I…

Pickling Beets

You might think from the number of posts I’ve written about beets that I must have planted rows and rows of them, but in truth I only planted about five feet! And yet I’m still eating them…for lunch every other day… The problem of excess beet greens does seem to have been solved, however. The…