Mistress Mary quite contrary...

The best part of gardening is gathering in the harvest. I love the shallots and garlic especially. The butter lettuce and arugula are the best I've ever tasted. Lovely little carrots and the ubiquitous zucchini.

Peter piper picked a peck of pickles

My lemon cucumbers are planted in a raised bed. They are cascading over the 5 foot trellis. Beautiful ladies, green, almost perfect with gorgeous yellowy fruit.The picklers... well not so pretty but producing. At first just a few curly, crazy, cukes good for nothing but a quick bite or two with a dash of sea salt. But today was the day. 3 decent sized picklers and 4 lemon cukes.

I harvested a single, grumpy looking, white wonder cuke and there was just enough.

Pickle time!!!!

For those of you who do not like pickles, I pity you. I opened up the jar of pickling spice and had a few moments of sweet, spicy heaven. Quickly I gathered the jars, the vinegar, garlic and onion harvested from the garden. I could hardly contain myself. Should I can them in a hot water bath and keep them on the shelf for a few weeks before eating them? Nope. This first batch was destined for a brief refrigerator existence, with near instant salivatory gratification.

15 minutes after making the bread and butter pickles, I was fishing in the hot jar and slipping a few beauties between slices of ham, cheese and whole wheat bread. No decent sandwich is complete without homemade pickles. If the juice is good enough, you don't even need to blot the pickles before slapping them on a sandwich. The juice is that good. I could die happy with a half eaten ham sandwich in my fist as long as a good pickle was in attendance. Insert sigh of contentedness here.