Gonna make some bread & butter pickles!

packerbacker · Jun 29, 2015

The pickling cucumbers are starting to get big enough for the bread and butter pickles. Also getting some salad cucumbers and squash. We put in a sink by the garden shed to wash everything off before bringing it into the house. Decided to put the bell peppers and eggplant on the drip system also. Seems to be working good for the watermelons.

ronwoodcraft · Jun 29, 2015

My Mom used to make those Bread & Butter Pickles. I'm jealous, your pics make me miss gardening. I guess that's one plus for living in CA.
Love that watermelon, I used to grow them in Idaho, and Oklahoma. Can't grow much of anything where I live now. It's possible to get a frost here any day of the year.

kingskid1611 · Jun 29, 2015

I have put off making a big garden for years because I am just too busy. I do container gardening but I do love those pics of the harvest. Congrats.

tamrock · Jun 30, 2015

Man you got that down to a science. Plants make me sad now ever since the cold snap last fall killed my grapes. But last week I did spot one leaf coming to the light... I'm just going to pick at Cosco for now... The sweet corn from Mexico ain't all that bad this time of the year anymore these days. Maybe when I retire I'll, go back to the love affair with mother nature once again. She can be a a real bear at times. Not sure what the future will be for man with the coming of the next Ice Age. We do how ever believe he did survive that last one relatively well by his skills. At least some folks did.

packerbacker · Jun 30, 2015

Grapes are tough rock, they'll come back. They sure looked good! I've got some seedless out back that I'll try and get a pic of for you. There's tons of them.
Here's a pic of the bread and butter pickles we got out of that batch of cucs. Got 12 pint jars and 13 quarts. This was just the first picking. We'll probably make some dills with the next batch.

packerbacker · Jun 30, 2015

tamrock, here's a pic of some of my grapes. They will get a little bigger and really sweet!

stefen · Jun 30, 2015

Hey neighbor, put a case or 2 on the bus and sent a little more north.

Damn those look good, especially the melon juice y'all are growin... :laughing7:

tamrock · Jul 1, 2015

packerbacker said:
tamrock, here's a pic of some of my grapes. They will get a little bigger and really sweet!

Should I hack mine down to the trunk? I was thinking that because most all the vine left look dead. You got a nice garden of things growing out there.

BosnMate · Jul 1, 2015

tamrock said:
Should I hack mine down to the trunk? I was thinking that because most all the vine left look dead. You got a nice garden of things growing out there.

I have concord grapes. A few years ago they were leafed out and making grapes and a frost wiped them out. Lost all the leaves. I didn't do a thing to them, and the leaves
started coming back. I figured there wouldn't be any grapes that year, and the the vines leafed out completely, and it wasn't to long and there were tiny grapes, and by golly
we got a crop of grapes that year like nothing ever happened to it. I don't do anything to our vines, they are on the property line, and make a privacy fence in the summer,
so I leave them alone, and let them do their thing, and they are thick and at least 7 feet tall. I think Packerbacker is probably 300 miles south of us, and what a difference that
makes. Our grapes ore off to a pretty good start, and his are getting ripe. Driving past the wine vineyards and I don't see any large bunches of grapes on them either.

packerbacker · Jul 1, 2015

tamrock is probably right, they are tough and hard to kill completely. I had a friend that tried to purposely get rid of his grape vines and they kept coming back.

tamrock · Jul 1, 2015

The fact is this place I live is a high plains desert and with the fluctuating climate about it, you can only expect what the weather trows at ya around here. This freeze was different being it came in the early half of the fall. I don't think this vine was given the time to shut down as it should for the winter or something like that? Before we people all came along to change the landscape around here, it all looked like this photo I found online. Out in the middle of the wheat field behind me there's a rocky rising knob that has never been cultivated, due to all the rocks. It's like a little island of what once was the landscape I live on. It still has the natural short grasses, sage and small cactus growing on it. It has been invaded some by some of the other intruder grasses that came later on, but down under those you can still see what once was the land around here. It was pretty bleak at one time.