Things are always changing at Aagaard Farms - and not just the seasons! We progress through different things throughout the growing season. Recently it was raspberry mania; people looking to come U-pick, people looking to have us pick for them, picking for the Farmers Markets, picking for jam. Lots of people phoning, people coming and going....but that's done now. Currently, it is pickle mania. Everyone who wants to make some pickles for the winter is in search of cucumbers and dill. We custom pick for people, with orders of anywhere from a couple of pounds to seventy five pounds! The poor cucumbers just can't produce fast enough - and almost everybody would love to get it done before school goes back in! We were finding this weekend that there seems to be a shortage of dill around; for many people it self-seeds from year to year, but in this odd flood year many people don't have any. I must have had twelve or fifteen people ask at the Friday Night Farmers Market and another eight or ten at Saturday's Farmers Market at Riverbank Discovery Centre! Cucumbers are late this year, too. Like everything, for almost everybody, they got planted late as we waited for the soil to dry up and warm up.
Most of our customers are looking for little cucumbers, no bigger than about four inches long, with a number smaller for stuffing the top of the jar. Very few people around Brandon seem to be making the big sliced dills anymore, perhaps it seems like more work to cut up the bigger cucumbers. After picking Thursday and getting small sizes for two customers, I was left with about ten pounds of, well, the perfect size for bread-and-butter pickles, one of my favorites! So, a quick check of the pantry, had the ingredients and so a batch was made. It wasn't until I was filling the jars that I realized I was using jelly/jam jars, as it is all that I have around! Most people would put pickles in a slightly bigger jar but this will be the perfect size for a household that doesn't eat a whole lot of pickles! Are you making any pickles this year?
Sounds yummy! Perhaps a jar will find it's way west?
ReplyDeletePerhaps....a care package goes east, a care package goes west!
ReplyDeleteI haven't had home made pickles in years. As a kid we used to go to u-pick for pickling cucumbers each year and jars and jars of dill pickles would be put up. My mom used to put garlic in the jars and it was always a fight who would get the pickled garlic. What great memories.
ReplyDeleteCanning is having such a resurgence with a younger crowd that we are having trouble keeping up on the pickling cucumbers this year! More requests for cukes and dill than every before!
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