Poppin’ and Lockin’

One of our friends gave us a bunch of cucumbers, so we thought we would go ahead and pickle them.  Our cucumber plants haven’t produced very many cucumbers this go round.  I sliced up all the cucumbers, and some jalapenos for the pickling process.  

 

Here is the water bath (back) and the pickling solutions (front).  The pickling solution is 3 cups White Vinegar, 3 cups water, and 3 teaspoons pickling salt.

Here we’ve added the jalapenos, cucumbers, garlic, mustard seeds, and some dill to the jars.  Now we put the lids on and drop them in the water bath for about 5 minutes.

 

Here they are in the water bath, this helps remove excess air which creates the vacuum when they cool.

The finished products, we ended up making 14 jars and two of them didn’t seal so we now have 12 jars of pickles that will be ready in about 3 months (2 months now since I’m slow at writing blogs).  Next project will be to pickle some okra and maybe some green beans.

House of Dreams

So I put the front and back wall on the hoop house this morning, and I thought I would share what they looked like.  So here’s the north side (this side faces our house and will get the most wind during the winter months),  I still need to put the guide ropes back on, but I had to call Keturah to get her advice on the best way to go about it.

 

This side is what we are calling the front or the south side.  This side is where we have our entrance, which is basically just overlapping sheets of plastic (which is kind of hard to see in this picture, but trust me it's there).

So that’s it, our next step is to cut back the plants inside the hoop house and take some clippings of the tomato plants that we wanted to winter in the house.  I might transplant our jalapeno plants into the hoop house; they didn’t make the cut when the last set of pvc pipes broke.