After You've Grown Your Own....

Freshly picked and washed . Ready for processing...

In an earlier post entitled "Growing Your Own", I wrote about the importance of providing some food security for your family in times of increasing economic turmoil and uncertainty.  Since then, things have continued to take a turn for the worse with a record number of Americans now enrolled in  government food stamp programs (aka SNAPS).  Would you want to dependent on any benefit being maintained by our bankrupt federal government?  No thanks.  Alternatively, you can begin to help yourself by grabbing a shovel, digging up that useless lawn, and planting a survival garden for your family.  Sure, it will take some practice to develop a green thumb of sorts but like with anything else perseverance should eventually yield to some sort of harvest-bountiful or not.  If it turns out to be the former, then you will need to get some practice in the various ways of preserving your abundant output.

Here on our modest homestead, we are getting some good yield this year on our cucumbers- most of which are the bush variety which are ideal for pickling.  For shorter term use, we process some of these as "refrigerator" pickles.  Not a difficult process and we seem to like the taste of these more than the ones we "can" for longer term storage in our food pantry.  Of course there are always new recipes to be tried. Bon Appetit!

...into a  new batch of  refrigerator pickles!