Gardening Thread - Show me your gardens!

I used deck screws with fender washers to attach them to wall studs. A friend of mine has several of them in his garage. We bolted them to each other and hit helped stabilize them.

Dried peppers.

 

Nice we do red rangers too

 

I do a 50/50 split of RR's and Cornish-X. The RR's get left as a whole bird and the Cornish X get cut in half. The RR's have better flavor on the grill, but the Cornish X have a much higher yield, and taste the same as the RR's after they've been slow-cooked in the crockpot with whatever seasonings I feel like using.

I've discovered that the mortality rates on the Cornish are almost zero if you go to a 12/12 feeding schedule, so we get more bird for our $$ from the Cornish

 

I like the metal shelves. we have one rack like that and a different wire rack on the other side.

 

They are sold out around here, but these work great for yellow jackets. I ordered some of the Heptyl butrate in liquid form. Im going to make my own traps...


https://store.doyourownpestcontrol....MIseexp4Xy3AIVF57ACh3NrQuXEAQYASABEgIACPD_BwE

 

I just made some last night out of pop bottles, red wine and some dog treats. Didn't catch any yet but they were swarming around them like crazy

 

It would be funnier if you added chicken names to the labels. Gretta 7-29-2018, Isabel 3-21-2018....

 

Time to make a couple jars of pickles tomorrow. I tried to grow them myself this year but the voles decided that wasn't going to happen so I ended up having to get them from the farm down the road. I actually have a couple cucumber plants that decided to take off in the last couple weeks but that's going to be too little, too late.

 

While technically not a garden OP did have some chickens in his very first post...

Finishing up the coop today and tomorrow

 

do yours end up crunchy or mushy? trying to find a good recipe for NON mushy pickles...

 

I use pickle crisp in each jar. Wife says they are crunchy.

 

Get those out of the fridge if you're planning on pickling them; when they're stored below 50 degrees they get what's called 'chilling injuries' (pitting and water-soaked areas) and are more likely to make mushy pickles.

 

I have lucked out on occasion but they usually end up a bit mushy. I read somewhere that if you cut 1/8" off the flower end that it helps them not get as mushy so I tried that this year. There is also a product from Ball called Pickle Crisp that you can add to the brine, it is just food grade calcium chloride but it makes them more salty so you have to reduce the amount of salt. I have also heard that adding a fresh grape leaf to each jar will keep them crisp but I haven't been able to get my hands on any at the right time yet.

 

Interesting, I never heard that before. Too late now as they are all canned. They were sitting out and up to room temp by the time I started filling jars though.

 

The year that I stuck mine in the fridge over the weekend and canned them on Monday night (after we got back from a camping trip) I had the mushiest pickles I've ever made. They were still tasty, but could not be called crisp. Usually I cold-pack mine, process them in the water bath canner with just a standard brine (no pickle crisp or other additons) and have nice crispy pickles, but these didn't have any sort of snap to them. Haven't refrigerated them since, and haven't had any trouble with mushy pickles since then either.

 

Do you slice them or are they whole?

 

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/dill-pickles-recipe-1950656 anyone try these?

 

Sliced lengthwise.
I stopped doing whole pickles because they take up so much room. You can only get 2-3 pickles in a quart jar and you waste a lot of brine filling up the empty air space.

 

Nope. I'm pretty basic with my pickling; I brine and process all of them so they're shelf-stable. A lot of the recipes I see for fermented stuff sort of sketch me out, frankly.

 

well thats how they used to do in the old days and people survived I think we've lost a lot methods due to FDA recommendations...Some stuff is sketchy though