Two summers ago we planted Long English cucumbers in the narrow garden along side our front walkway. We had fantastic results and couldn't eat them fast enough, we were forcing them on our friends and family! Armed with a new recipe I was eager to try pickle making once again to use up our abundance of beautiful cukes. Had I been more on the ball and the cucumbers had been a wee bit fresher I may have had better results...they were mushy, but we enjoyed them anyways, and the flavour was fantastic!!!
Last year the house had to be painted so sadly we were not able to use the garden at all. :o(
This year we were back up and running so I decided to order some pickling cuke seeds so that I could get a good crop of pickles as well as lots of long english cucumbers.
I mixed a nice blend of compost and fish fertilizer and the bed was ready for planting all the tender seedlings that grew in my living room window!
They transplanted well and began to flower quite early in the season, I was so pumped!
All was going well until the leaves started to wilt for no apparent reason. One by one down the row the plants withered and died. We suspect that we have a bug that's eating the roots right out from under our plants. It has killed about half of the plants so we have had a very small crop of cukes this year.....sigh!
But I always say that "one should never expect great results from the garden, then you are happy with whatever you are blessed with"! Luckily our local farmer grows pickling cukes and because the nasty bug was over at our house, his turned out fine! ;o)
So here are the cute little jars of pickles that I made this year with the local cukes that I had to buy. I don't know where the jars originally came from, I was given a box full by a friend's coworker when she cleaned out her basement.
I was very excited that we were able to try out our recipe again. It's on the recipe page if you want to give it go! (scroll down past the other recipes)
Wishing you a bountiful harvest of whatever you have grown in your garden. Please feel free to share your links, stories and recipes in the comments!
xoxo
~ joey ~
Ah yes, never expect great results from a garden- I made that mistake this year- I had such high hopes! But it is true, there is lots to be happy about out there if I look at what there is growing. Yours is looking lovely, and those pickles look terrific! We made a bunch too, mostly with ones we bought, though we got about a jar-full of our own!
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to thank you for the sweet note on my blog about allergies. I would love to chat with you about it. Would you send me your e-mail through my small wonders blog email and I could write you back? Thanks so much!
ReplyDeleteFunny, I was totally NOT expecting great results from my garden this year. I had just reclaimed it from several years of complete, utterly overgrown, neglect. Then there were the seedling-eating critters, and garden-tromping children, and so forth. And you know what? The garden was ridiculously productive. Then I was actually a bit bummed cuz I had to DEAL with all of that produce that I hadn't really anticipated in the first place. Ha! We can be silly, complex creatures, no?
ReplyDeleteLOVE that first shot of your garden. I would just wander up and down it ALL DAY LONG. Daydreaming. SUCH hyrdrangeas!