For some reason this year, I’m going to need to do a lot of canning/freezing, since the garden is putting out way more food then I can eat each day. And this bounty already includes plenty of stuff that I’ve already given away to friends and co-workers. Just to give you an idea of the bounty this year, on July 14th I picked sixteen cucumbers from the garden that went into the 3 quart jars of pickles. When I went into the garden today the 18th to check the sweet corn for wind damage (because of the heavy storm we had last night) I ended up picking 8 cucumbers from the garden without really looking hard.

So last week I started the first of many canning sessions that will happen this year, and the first experiments of the year was 3 quart jars of dill pickles, 4 pint jars of spicy pickled beans (both green & wax from the garden) and 4 pint jars of pickled carrots (I ended up using baby carrots from the store, since the potatoes over took the carrots in the pallet bin.)

I’ll add separate posts over the next couple of days for the recipes for the dill pickles, pickled carrots, and spicy pickled beans. Just to keep the length of this post manageable, compared to the sausagefest post which ran close to three pages just in text.