Pickled Okra

I pickled some (more) okra last night.  Most of it came from the farmers' market, but I did do another quart of pods from my own diminutive set of plants.  I'm growing burgundy okra and it has turned out well.  Last year I tried to grow it but the deer got it all before it produced anything.  Output has been modest and has trickled in, so it has been a challenge to do anything with it.

At any rate, I had about a half pound of my own okra plus six pounds from the farmers' market.  Flipping over to the NCHFP, one can see that six or seven pounds of okra ought to net out to around eight or nine pints.  I knew that was wrong.  As I have noted elsewhere, I usually don't get as much food content into the jars as the guides say for whatever reason--and for some things, I have been waaaayy off.  I knew that I'd get more jars of okra than forecast--I expected about seven quarts.  It ended up being the equivalent of seven quarts; I did six quarts and two pints.  Interestingly, I upped the liquids to seven cups each of water and vinegar, and probably had about two cups left over--so the quantities of water and vinegar were okay.  I also increased the salt proportionately by another two tablespoons.


It wasn't possible to get any more okra into those jars.  I packed them very tightly and even crushed one or two.  Hopefully the end product will be okay. The jar with the burgundy okra is at the right front in the photo to the right.

Thoughts on Tomatoes

I've been growing tomatoes for a few years.  I've had a variety of problems at times, but usually gotten a decent crop.  Some years (like this one) I get a very good one.  As I mentioned in July, I dehydrate most tomatoes, but also can them sometimes, too.  This year I had enough at one time to can, but I went ahead and dehydrated the lot.

I usually have blight problems--generally early blight.  This year the blight is more limited.  Generally my tomatoes are pretty well done by now, but then they get a second wind in September and I end up with some green ones at the time of first frost.  This year I'm still getting tomatoes in mid-August and will dehydrate them, as well.


 I've never had too much trouble with blossom end rot, which can be attributed to calcium and / or dry growing conditions as the tomatoes are developing.  Sometimes my tomatoes get mushy while developing and I toss them; occasionally I get severe bug damage.  There are usually a few stink bugs on them when I go out to the garden, but the damage they have caused is limited.

Last year--for the first and only time ever--I had some tobacco hornworms and saw one that had been turned into a host by parasitical wasps.  Very gruesome, but I was happy to help the biological controls work.  Otherwise, the hornworms haven't been a major problem, either.

I've become convinced that there are subtle variations in growing conditions that influence what varieties do well.  I always grow at least two or three types--almost always heirlooms--and individual types seldom do well in two consecutive years.  Cherokee Purple is an exception; it has usually performed very well but this year my two plants have been duds.  One year Amish Paste was worthless, yielding one tomato from one plant all year; another year it produced abundantly.  I used the same package of seeds to start plants both years.  One year some heirloom start from Home Depot whose name I can't remember produced about 60% of what I got off of five plants.  This year Mortgage Lifter has done okay but it usually flops for me.  Homestead is doing well this year; it might be the unknown Home Depot plant from a few years ago or it might be new (you can tell my record-keeping is not 100% of what it needs to be).  I tried Nebraska Wedding, a yellow determinate variety, never worked for me despite trying two or three years.  I never got a single tomato.  One of my favorites for flavor:  Frankenstein Black.  I started it from seed a couple of years and it produced a decent amount.

It might be there there are other factors: seeds and starts (I've done both) are variable, so that might be what accounts for the problems rather than growing conditions. I don't know--it may be a combination of things, some observable and others not.  In a practical sense, it doesn't matter: the solution is the same.  Plant several varieties and at least one will probably do well.

Bread and Butter Pickles

A couple of weeks ago I processed some cucumbers.  My overall harvest isn't going to be all that great; the vines are not looking like they'll produce that much longer.  But I did get enough for a load of bread and butter pickles, my favorite.  The Ball Blue Book and Pickyourown.org have similar recipes, which I generally follow.  One exception is that I don't salt and ice the cucumbers; I just fresh-pack them, cutting the salt a little. PYO mentions draining and rinsing after icing.  The NCHFP site calls for icing beforehand, as well, but skips the rinsing step. So although I use a bit less salt, my finished product might have more salt in the brine.  I end up with a brine that is about as salty as what one would get by using Mrs. Wages' bread and butter mix.

My cucumbers this year were all yellow (Edmonson from Southern Exposure and Miniature White from Seedsavers).  The recipes above call for onion, so I added some white onion slices, using store-bought ones (I haven't grown my own onions yet).

The procedure is pretty simple: slice; mix the brine (with the various spices indicated, plus sugar); add the slices (onion and cucumber) to jars; pour in the brine, and process.  I got about 1.1 lb. of cucumbers per quart (when mixed with the onion).  That's a bit less than anticipated by the recipes above, which suggest around 1.5 lb. per quart (or per two pints).  As I have noted elsewhere, I'm usually not able to pack as much into jars as the recipes suggest.  Hot- vs. raw-packing matters, but in this case the recipes are for raw pack, as well.  I had two bowls of cucumbers, not the one suggested by the picture above.  All that notwithstanding, I'm happy with the results (shown below is also a jar of pickled okra I threw in; I used a different brine mix for that).

Pickled Carrots

I don't grow carrots in the garden.  I have done radishes, but never carrots.  I don't have tilled soil that goes down far enough to accomodate carrots. I got some Paris Market seeds one year (a shorter variety) but never planted them.

Nonetheless, if I ever do grow them, I may end up with enough to need to preserve them somehow.  Then again, maybe I won't.  Excuses falling by the wayside, I decided to try pickling carrots last month--just because.  The concept is interesting, and I like pickled vegetables.  I've done cucumbers (dill and sweet), dilled green beans, and asparagus.  All have turned out well. I've also done peaches.  I've bought commercially canned okra.  But I had never tried carrots.

As I mentioned before when discussing peach butter, I usually don't get very creative with canning.  Canning guides admonish against that as a rule, but the keys with any canning recipe are that if it's destined for a boiling water bath, the pH has to be below 4.7, and with either boiling water or pressure, the temperature has to get to the required threshold for the required time to kill pathogens.


The National Center for Home Food Preservation has a recipe for pickled carrots and Pick Your Own has essentially the same recipe.

I used peeled baby carrots (note that the NCHFP has a separate recipe for pickled baby carrots, but it's basically the same except that it substitues a volume measurement for the carrots instead of weight).  Because no pre-processing is involved, unlike most things I can, this was a quick job.  I just dumped the carrots into a couple of large Cinderella-style mixing bowls and looked over them to see if there were any that needed to be culled or trimmed (ever eat a bad carrot? They are not good). I used six pounds of carrots (two bags of three pounds each).  This is about ten percent more than two times the amount in the recipes referred to above, but I think the syrup mix was adequate the first time (i.e., 11 cups of vinegar with 2 cups of water).  By the time I did the second batch, I forgot that 11/2 worked so I upsized it in the same proportion, using 13 cups of vinegar and proportionally more water, plus an extra 1/3 cup of sugar and a bit of extra salt.  The second time, I probably had almost two cups left over. 

When I can, I run the jars through a dishwasher cycle, which cleans and heats them.  So I didn't even start processing until the dishwasher was running.  Getting the syrup mix up to boiling was relatively quick, and once I dumped the carrots in, it took a relatively long time to get it back to boiling for the three-minute simmer referred to in the instructions (six pound of refrigerated carrots really cooled things down).

The dishwasher was in its dry cycle by the time I got the carrots back to boiling, so I started filling jars as soon as I could.  The first time I did eight pints and one quart; the second time I did three quarts and three pints.  If you're counting, you see I got more the first time, at least in terms of jars.   In the first batch, the last pint was only about half full of carrots; the rest was syrup.

To fill each jar, I pretty much just followed the directions--into each empty jar went two tablespoons of mustard seed and one tablespoon of celery seed per pint, then carrots were ladled in using a canning funnel; I shook and tapped the bottom of the jar on the counter top to settle the carrots as compactly as possible.  Then I put in enough syrup to get the headspace to about 1/2".

Overall, they turned out pretty well.  People who have tried them have either grimaced and walked away after just one or two or eaten them with gusto.  They are somewhat sweet, as you might expect given both the flavor of carrots and the added sugar.

The other methods for preserving carrots include dehydrating and freezing, but both of those require blanching.

So now I have a bunch of carrots, but I've already eaten a fair number.  I don't think I'll have any trouble going through these in the next year or so.