Squash and Pickles

This weekend I had to do some garden clean up. The cucumber and squash vines were dying back pretty severely and several leaves had powdery mildew. So, I harvested all remaining fruits on those vines. Above, you can see the cucumbers. The white one is perfectly solid and good to eat; it just didn't turn green because it was growing so deep inside the vine, it never got any sunlight.


I was pretty happy with my delicata squash harvest. I like delicata, as I like pretty much all vegetables, but it's not my favorite winter squash. I grew it because I thought it had a better chance of ripening in the shorter growing season of the Pacific Northwest than say, a typically larger squash, like butternut. But now, I think that's immaterial...these delicata were set and ripening all the way back in July. They could have grown a lot bigger; they just didn't for some reason, maybe the variety (they were a bushing variety). Next year, I'll try a different kind of winter squash.

green pumpkin to ripen indoors (hopefully)

And then of course, there was my brave volunteer pumpkin vine, from which I already harvested quite a large specimen a while back. I had to cut this guy off the vine and am trying to ripen him in my sun room...we'll see how that goes.

crock pickle fixins

I decided to try some crock pickles with the fat cucumbers from my garden. I remember going to a German deli with my mom when I was kid and being fascinated by a large barrel of enormous pickles floating in an eerie brine. I always had to have one, and my mom would always oblige. I assume these pickles that I remember were crock pickles, soured in a salt brine.

I followed this recipe on Planted at Home blog. I just had to try a recipe from a lady who also likes to devour peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches! The likes of which, I think I took for lunch every single day of my grade school career.

cucumbers in jars, along with dill weed, garlic, and hot peppers

Here they are in the brine; they should be fully sour in 3 weeks (fingers crossed) :


And then, with some pickling cucumbers from the farmers' market, I made a small batch of bread and butter pickles. Again, a childhood favorite. By the way, have I mentioned that I like pickles?