Fermenting Pickles

So, our local farmer's market opened yesterday so I swung by to check it out. It's still really early, so there were mostly just greens and other early spring veggies available, but I did pick up some pickling cucumbers. I started fermenting them today and should hopefully have delicious dill pickles in a few weeks.

It's pretty easy to ferment the pickles. The recipe I used was from "For the Love of Pickles". You just load up a jar or crock with all your veggies and ingredients. In this case - cucumbers, garlic, mustard seeds, dill, allspice seeds, peppercorns, and red pepper flakes.

Then mix up your brine (water and pickling salt) and cover your veggies with brine.

Then put a Ziploc bag in the top of the jar, and fill with the remaining brine. This should create an airlock and prevent nasties from making a home in your pickles. 

The hard part is waiting 2 weeks til they are ready to eat! Will update you then and if the recipe is successful - will post it in it's entirety. 

Vegetable Garden update

It's the 3rd week of June and the garden is looking good.

Just planted some bush beans for drying - black, calypso, kidney, cranberry varieties

 Some corn sprouts coming up in the two pots

 Butternut squash is starting well

 

 Watermelon vines

 The hops have topped out the trellises and are starting to flower and form cones

The two paprika pepper plants didn't make it early so we replaced with jalapenos from the garden center. 

Some baby peppers 

 We started the onions a little late, not sure how big they'll be when we harvest them. 

 The bed of garlic that was planted last fall looks fantastic.  

 They all have scapes or have bloomed, so they'll start dying and be ready for harvesting in a few weeks.

The tomatillos and ground cherries that we started from seed really took off once they were in the ground. 

 Tomatoes are nice and bushy, and all have fruit

We did potatoes in the pots again, hopefully they do better than last year

 Sweet potato vines in half of the pots

June Blooms

Persian Shield

 Butterfly Weed

  Liatris

 Lilly

 Geranium

 Coreopsis

 Coreopsis

 Clematis

 Daylilly

 Daylilly

Coral Bells

 Sea Holly

 Astilbe

 Primrose

 Caladium and Begonia

Fruit Trees and Bushes

Our 2nd year fruit trees are doing well.  The cherry and apple trees did not fruit, but the plum trees and the peach tree are small but have a decent amount of fruit on them.  

The two plum trees

Peach tree

The 4 Elderberry bushes are doing great, with two in their 3rd year, and the other two in their 2nd year. 

The currant bushes now like their new location and put out a lot of new growth this spring.  The Red Currant did not fruit, but the Pink Champagne variety does have a few

The red raspberries have a lot of new canes, the black raspberries have a lot of fruit, not quite ripe yet