Regular dill pickles take about 10 minutes to make. Up to a half-hour if you’re going to can them.

Sweet pickles take a minimum of 7 days.

Day 1: Trim the ends off your cucumbers.

Then pour boiling water over them and let them sit overnight. I think people used to do this in a crock of some sort, but I just used one of my stainless steel pots.

Day 2: They now look like this:

Not as pretty as they used to be! Pour boiling water over them and let them sit again.

Days 3 and 4: repeat day 2.

Day 5: Big excitement! We get to mix up the brine.

It takes nearly a full bag of sugar! And some vinegar. A little salt, and the pickling spices. It smells like Autumn!

Also, it’s time to cut up the cucumbers into whatever size pieces you want. I decided to cut mine into chunks.

Pour the brine over the cucumbers, and let them sit for 2 days. I gave them a stir each morning and night.

Day 7 (or day 8 in my case since we weren’t home on day 7): It’s finally time to can them! Bring everything to a boil, and then pack in hot jars. Can in a boiling-water bath.

I got 6 pints out of my batch. No one else in the family likes them (they all tried one and made faces and icky sounds). My father-in-law has been begging for sweet pickles, so he has a few jars heading his way.

With a little help from Emily and Kevin, I cleaned up the garden today. It had been ignored for far too long. The weeds were taking over, and some of the plants had been attacked by bugs.

We pulled all of the weeds by hand, cut off the old ugly leaves from the zucchini (and pulled up a couple of the plants that were too far gone), cut off the worst leaves from the green beans, and planted some flowers in the “dead zone.”

Some before and after photos:

Hopefully now, with a little babying, the plants will perk up.

Emily has 2 American Girl dolls. First she got Emily (of course!). Last Christmas, she got Molly.

Emily has a swimsuit. Molly does not.

We’re going to a pool party this evening. Both dolls want to attend the party as well, but alas, no swimsuit for Molly! Tragedy!

Enter mom, a half-hour, some scrap fabric, some velcro, a piece of ribbon, and whatever thread happens to already be in the sewing machine. It’s like a Project Runway challenge for the 18-inch set.

Molly now has proper pool party attire.

For future reference, it takes exactly 5 of my little cucumbers, and a half-recipe of the brine to make 2 quarts of pickles.

These went straight to the refrigerator. We love refrigerator pickles. So easy to make (not that canning is difficult, it’s just more steps and more dishes!), and the cukes stay crispy.

The only problem is waiting for them to be ready to eat! It takes a minimum of a week (2 for them to really absorb the flavor).

I checked the cucumber plants last night, and there are a lot of babies plumping up! Next pickling day, I’ll make a batch that isn’t spicy for the kids. I also want to try making some sweet pickles.

Added to this week’s grocery list: Vinegar, garlic, and dill. My little dill plants are growing, but not fast enough to be used for the pickles yet!

Plus one more that was picked yesterday.

I’m not sure how many jars I’ll get out of these 5, maybe 2 quart jars (not packed tightly). We’ll make refrigerator pickles, using this recipe I used last year.

I’ll make some spicy for the adults, and not as spicy for the kids. Some zucchini will likely be added to the mix as well!

Or “Future Pickles,” since that is what they will end up being!

My 3 cucumber plants are also parthenocarpic like the zucchini (doesn’t require pollination to set fruit). The plants had lots of female flowers with little baby cucumbers, but once the flowers fell off, the babies didn’t seem to be growing any larger. I was afraid that they weren’t going to produce.

But ignore them for 2 days, and this is what you see!

There are 5-6 cukes fattening up on the vines now. And hopefully more every day.

I’ll be using the garlic that I harvested for those pickles:

These were the only 2 remaining plants from the 9 cloves we planted last fall. You’re supposed to harvest in the fall, but the leaves were already turning brown. And I was just dying to see whether they grew into bulbs anyway! They sure did. They’re very small, but if they’d been able to grow the rest of the season, I think they’d have reached a nice size. The bulbs were very deep in the soil (clay) too. I think the freezing & thawing, plus being planted where I hadn’t loosened the soil much led to that.

We’ll try again this fall! I’d like to try growing some hard and softneck varieties this time.

The Spring edition of our Pleasingly Perfecto Personal Presents was supposed to be sent at the beginning of April – in time for Easter. This time our theme was “The Living Room.”

Well, we both got a little behind. Although we did pretty well at actually purchasing our gifts, there was much time spent trying to find boxes the right size, and then actually putting the darn things in the mail. And vacation trips and business trips and broken collarbones and house painting and school events. We changed the name of the swap this month to “We Suck at Pleasingly Perfecto Personal Presents.”

Madalyn did a little better than me, and managed to get her gift in the mail first. I finally did, and Madalyn was the first to post about her gift.

I forced myself to finally take photos, so you all can see!

A cute square picture frame (with no photo in it yet – I mean, come on, you can’t expect me to put something in it right away when it took me 2 months longer than it should to get Madalyn’s gift in the mail?), and a set of photo coasters (also not even taken the shrink wrap off yet – what’s the point if I don’t have photos picked out to put in them yet?).

Thanks, Madalyn!!!

The zucchini plants have gone from this:

to this:

to this:

to our first harvest!

Many more will be ready to harvest this week. We’ll be having zucchini cake for the girls’ birthday party this weekend!

Unfortunately, this isn’t from berries from my garden (we don’t grow enough for that!).

A couple of months ago, strawberries were on sale at the grocery store (and they were good berries too!). I bought 5 or 6 containers. I washed, hulled, and cut them up, and then flash froze them. Then I put them into a vacuum-sealed bag and back into the freezer.

On Memorial Day, I finally had time to turn them into jam!

The recipe says it’ll make 8 half-pints, but I got more than that. 8 half-pints (one I didn’t process, it went straight to the fridge since we were out of jam) and 3 quarter-pints. I just love those tiny little jars!

Last year I had 5 half-pints, and that lasted us almost the whole year. So this will definitely have us covered for the next year.

I thought my plants were everbearers last year…because that’s what they did! They produced berries all spring & summer.

But this year, they seem to be about done.

The new plants don’t seem to be producing flowers any longer either (I picked the flowers off so that they wouldn’t fruit yet – they need to get better established first).

But who knows what may happen later? Maybe they’ll have another period of fruiting? We’ll just have to wait and see.