Using sound judgment to be more self-reliant.
Often when people start talking about integrating a garden or other food crops into the landscape, the design ideas still tend to focus on two dimensional diagrams. How many fruit or veggie plants can I fit per square foot? While there's nothing wrong with this per se, it means you're missing out on some great opportunities to optimize growing space you might not even realize that you have.
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My early attempts at dill pickles were not very successful. I followed the FDA guidelines from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving
, and ended up with tasty pickles with absolutely no crunch. I love my Blue Book, but these were not the pickles I was looking for. As I understand it, many commercial manufacturers add alum (basically aluminum) to give their pickles crunch. Needless to say, I wasn't going that direction. These no can dill pickles bring the crunch without the aluminum.
This recipe is from my neighbor Betty. Betty and I have swapped a lot of produce and recipes over the years (she's also my son's piano teacher and has become like a grandmother to him 🙂 ). Betty makes a simple old-fashioned brined dill pickle that doesn't require canning, and couldn't be easier to make. [Read more…]
