Though my own cucumber plants have yet to produce a single cucumber of edible size, my parents cucumbers have been working on overtime this week. After a good sized harvest it was clear that something had to be done, so we made dill pickles.
We did cheat a little bit with the recipe since we used a premixed blend of pickling spice, but sometimes less complicated is better.
First things first - we chopped the ends off of each cucumber and sliced them into spears
When the water bath was close to ready we mixed the pickling spice with the recommended amounts of water and vinegar and set it on the stove to boil.
When the jars were ready and everything was boiling, we took the jars out and packed them as best we could with spears. Then we topped of the jars with the pickling brine and sealed them up before placing them back into the water bath.
It wasn't easy to get those spears into those jars and there seemed to be a lot of leftover space in each jar, but we only fit what we could. We realized as we were filling the jars with brine that there might not be enough to fill them all, so we had to quickly whip up another batch (thank goodness for premixed salt and spices!)
We ended up with a total of five quarts of homegrown pickles and I have a feeling there will be plenty more of those before the season is over.
Can't wait to see how they taste in a few weeks!
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