I thought I’d share the recipe I used for dill pickles, they were some of the best tasting pickles I’ve ever had!

Dill Pickles

Ingredients

8lbs of 3″-4″ fresh cucumbers

4 cups of white vinegar

12 cups of water

2/3 cups of pickling salt

16 cloves of garlic, pealed and halved

8 sprigs of fresh dill

8 heads of fresh dill (can be substituted with 1 tsp of dill seed)

Directions

Wash the cucumbers and soak in ice water for 2-8 hours, don’t soak them for more than 8 hours.

Boil the vinegar, salt, and water in a large pot.

While the vinegar is boiling, slice the cucumbers into quarters and prepare the canning jars.

In each jar add 2 half cloves, 1 head of dill and add the cucumbers.

At the top of each jar, add 2 more cloves of garlic and a sprig of dill.

Fill the jars with the brine leaving 1″ of head space.

Wipe the rim and seal with new lids.

Give the jars a hot water bath for 15 minutes.

Label the jars and store for at least 8 weeks.

I varied the recipe in a few jars with fresh green beans instead of the sliced cucumbers as well as two jars with 1 tsp of peppercorns. I tried the beans after about a month but they didn’t seem to pick up the flavor as well as the cucumbers. I suspect they need at least 2 months to set up, but they were still pretty good. I haven’t tried the pickles with the peppercorns yet, but I’m sure they’ll have a little more zest.

We had a nasty thunderstorm system move through Southern Maine last night. Two tornadoes were reported by the National Weather Service in other towns, but looking at the havoc in my garden, it looks like a mini tornado touched down here! Look at the damage.

The tomatoes…

Perhaps a hedgerow would prevent this?

Some of the corn plants were blown right over and I’m afraid I’m going to loose them. I also need to either buy more tomato cages or build some, they took a hit too. I’ll try and straighten the corn our and give them some added support around the roots. One thing is for sure, I built the mounds too small, I need to make wider mounds and plant more corn per mound.

Mother Nature came and said hello, she’s a generous mother…but can smack you around and let you know who’s boss when she wants to.

The up-side is that I got two very nice zucchini squash and a few cukes out of the garden while surveying the damage from last nights storm.

I was checking out the garden today and saw this huge black bug on the Blueberry bush.

The Blueberries are large, so here’s a picture of the bug and my finger to give an idea of the size of this thing.

This scary thing seems to be called a Root Borer (Derobrachus geminatus), but from what I can tell, they are from the warmer southern states. What he’s doing up here I don’t know. I don’t feel that it’s a menace to the garden so I’ll leave him be.

I ate quite a few of them, but here’s a shot of some of the ripe blueberries that I haven’t eaten yet.

There’s a bunch of babies starting to hatch in the garden! Read on…

The Sweet Corn

I noticed the first ear of corn on one of the larger plants tonight. It already has silk to catch the falling pollen from the tassels off the top of the stalk. This is the first year I’ve grown corn and it’s very exciting to see the first ears starting to form. I hope the wind stays down to help in pollination over the next few days as I’ve noticed that quite a few of my stalks have tassels forming at the top and the silk on the stalk should be forming soon.

I also noticed something kind of weird on one of the other corn plants, it seems to have another stalk coming out of where an ear should be. From what I’ve read, this is a tiller, a secondary stalk and should be lower to the ground. I’ll have to keep an eye on it and see what happens.

The Brandy-wine Tomatoes

I’ve noticed something odd with a few of my Brandy-wine tomatoes, a few have split in a bad way and has exposed the inside of the fruit. My first instinct is to take them off and make room for other, healthier looking tomatoes.  Turns out that this could be caused by blight or uneven watering. The other tomatoes, and the plant itself aren’t showing similar signs, so I suspect that our recent weather played a big part in this. We’ve been having heavy rain followed by hot sunny weather. This is most likely the cause of the split tomato. Below is a picture of the it what I’m referring to.

Below, is one of the less-developed tomatoes that have had a more steady watering pattern.

The Three Sisters

As a final update, here is a picture of the same Three Sister’s mound in an earlier post. The weed control is working quite well and the plants seem to be growing well. I’ve been eating the peas right off the vine until there’s enough to harvest.

The first one is the recipe for the beef jerky my Mom always made us for Christmas. My brothers and I would look forward to this every year and it was gone faster than a squirrel climbing a bird feeder.

You’ll need a dehydrator and food slicer…you could do it in the oven and have the meat sliced at the grocery store, but I prefer to do things at home and the food dehydrator is far more efficient than the oven. I try to use oven roasts when they’re on sale and make all three recipes in one batch. When all is said and done, it’s about a 70% reduction from a pound of beef once it’s finished.

Note: Mom’s instructions say to soak the meat for a few minutes, but I’ve found that soaking the meat overnight in the mix distributes it more evenly. The thickness of the slice is whatever you prefer, I like them thin and a little crunchy.

Mom’s Traditional Beef Jerky (as written on the index card)

• 2/3 c Worcestershire Sauce
• 2 oz Soy Sauce
• 1 T Maple Syrup
• 1/4 t Onion Powder
• 1/8 t Garlic Powder
• 1/4 t Ground Pepper
• 1/8 t Liquid Smoke
• 1/3 c Water
• 3-4 lbs Thin Sliced Lean Beef
• Soak the beef in the liquid a few minutes and cook for 12 – 16 hours in a very warm dehydrator.

Spicy Stuff

This name was adopted from the folks I work with and only has three ingredients.

• 1/3 c McCormick Grill Mates Montreal Steak seasoning
• 2/3 c Water
• 3-4 lbs Thin Sliced Lean Beef
• Soak the beef in the liquid a few minutes and cook for 12 – 16 hours in a very warm dehydrator.

A1 Jerky

As with the Spicy Stuff above, this only has three ingredients.

• 1/3 c A1 Steak Sauce.
• 2/3 c Water
• 3-4 lbs Thin Sliced Lean Beef
• Soak the beef in the liquid a few minutes and cook for 12 – 16 hours in a very warm dehydrator.

You may have seen my previous posts about “The Three Sisters”, I’ll attempt to explain what I’m talking about and give you some history behind the technique and why I like this idea.

I learned about this method of companion planting from one of the fellow gardeners that I work with. He learned about it from a book called Notes on a Lost Flute: A Field Guide to the Wabanaki. In the book, among other things, I learned about the Three sisters and wanted to try it myself.

There are three components – Corn, Beans, and Squash. The corn acts as support for the beans to climb, the beans fix nitrogen into the soil for the corn, and the squash provides ground cover to hold in moisture and cut down on weeds. In addition, when eaten together, the food makes a complete protein.

You start off by planting 4-6 corn seeds in a 3 foot wide mound. Once the corn is 6 inches or so, plant the beans and squash. From what I’ve seen with my mounds, the corn should be about 12 inches before planting the rest. It’s also best to soak the corn seeds for 24 hours before planting. I tried soaking and not soaking and the corn seeds that were not soaked are about 2 weeks behind the ones that were. On each mound, inside the circle of corn I half buried a dark stone about the size of a softball. The stone absorbs the heat during the day and keeps the seeds warm at night, the rock seemed to work out well in my garden.

I’m trying a few variations this year just to see what works. All of the mounds have corn in the center, but I planted peas on some mounds and pole beans in the other. I also varied the ground cover portion, there’s various cucumbers, butternut squash, yellow squash, watermelon and pumpkins. I tried to keep the squash family of plants separated by cucumbers to cut down on cross-pollination, I’m not sure how a butternut-waterpumkin would turn out.

Here’s a picture of one of the mounds as of this morning.

I had to do quite a bit of weeding at first, but now that the leaves are spreading out, the weeds have been dramatically cut down. The beans haven’t started yet, but the peas and cucumbers are starting to produce. I’ve also had to add stakes to reinforce the corn after the beans took down a few stalks. This is why I recommended waiting a little longer before planting the peas or beans. I suspect that the squash could be planted with the corn seeds without any issues.

Happy Farming!

My step-mother gave me this recipe after we tried some made out of the Rhubarb from the garden. It was absolutely wonderful!

Mix and sift the following dry ingredients:

• 2 c Flour
• 1tsp Baking Soda
• 1 tsp Cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp Cloves
• 1 1/2 c Sugar
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1/2 tsp Allspice

Add in:

• 1 c Oil
• 2 Eggs
• 1/2 c Milk

Once mixed, fold in:

• 2 1/2 – 3 c Rhubarb

Mix together the following and sprinkle it over the top:

• 1/2 c Margarine (Soft)
• 1 c Sugar
• 1 c Flour
• 1 tsp Cinnamon

Bake for 50 minutes @ 350 degrees.

The Japanese Beetles have started their attack and are munching away at almost every plant in the garden. I found this online and think I’ll try it. It sounds like icky boyish fun

Bug Juice spray: If you can handle it this is supposed to work. Harvest about 1 cup of beetles, put them in an old blender and liquefy them. Thin this with enough water to make it pass through a sprayer. Spray it on any plants they victimize. NOTE: If you make this out of beetles infected with the milky spore disease you will actually infect more grubs with the disease. So…if you can handle it give it a try!

I’ll let everyone know how it works.

I think I’ve finally found blogging software that will work for me. I originally started out manually creating my website, creating thumbnails by hand and making static pages. Then I moved on to MySQL/PHP, that worked for a while but still had quite a bit of manual updating. I started working on my own PHP code to handle what I wanted and found B2Evolution…that didn’t work so well. I bit the bullet and installed WordPress after learning that there’s an iPhone app for it. Hopefully this works…