It's Cucumber Season!

The dog days of summer are upon us and the weather is hot, hot, hot! My garden is growing so quickly and we have now begun the harvest season. One of the first items to pick were the cucumbers.

Last year, we had accidentally planted a bush variety of pickling cukes. This was problematic for us as we had a trellis set in place for them to climb on. This year, we found the right seed variety and the vines climbed up their wall. Look at how well they turned out!

What I really like about this method is how the fruits hang straight down so they are not prone to curl. This is especially important for me because I love canning pickles and want my cucumbers to be as straight as possible so they can fit in my canning jars easily. They also stay above the ground so when it rains, they are not sitting in the mud getting dirty. When a cucumber lays on the ground they a prone to rot and disease. With the vines crawling up the fence, they have more air circulation, too, to help lesson the chances of mildew setting in.

The pollinators easily find the flowers and the big leaves shade the fruit from the sun. There are so many benefits! I highly recommend trying a trellis system for your cucumber plants if you don't have one already. Just lessening the space they take up in the garden with vertical gardening is a big plus in my book!

Now, about the pickles. We can all types in our home. We have made bread & butter, sweet, and dill pickles. We have made quick pickles and fermented pickles. We generally like the quick pickles as you can use the new Ball Pickle Crisp product. It has worked very well for me to keep the pickles crunchy. I have been using this in the batches and batches of sweet icicle pickles we have been making.

These are my family's all time favorite! Who cannot resist having a pickle with their sandwich at a BBQ? And, these are so easy because all you need to do is make the brine, pack the cucumbers in the jars, and pop them into the Auto Canner. (I promise I will make a video in the future showing this recipe.)

My only issue is entering them at our county fair. You see we have a pickles division, but there are many classes to enter pickles in. And, you can only pick one for each recipe. The premium list hasn't changed for decades. So, they reflect many of the old recipes people used to pickle. For example, these pickles pictured and fit easily into five classes:

1.  Mustard, because mustard seed is used in the recipe.
2. Turmeric, because there is turmeric in the recipe too.
3. Sweet, they are not dill but a sweet pickle according to the Ball Canning Blue Book.
4. Spears, that is how they are shaped.
5. Quick, because they are not fermented but canned the same day they are picked.

Some days I would like to just enter a jar in each class and see how well I do. But, I usually enter them in the turmeric category as this is the only recipe I make with that spice. I usually make other pickle recipes that fit into the rest of the categories.

Happy pickling!