Pickles!

I have finally made my first batch of pickles this year. Apparently two pickling cucumber plants is no where near enough to produce enough cucumbers at once for a batch of pickles, I think I need closer to 10-15 plants. So I bought some at the farmers market along with the bell pepper the recipe calls for since mine aren't quite ready yet. I made sweet dills. It is the Farmers grandmothers recipe. I'm not usually a fan of sweet pickles, I don't like bread and butter pickles but these are amazing! Here's the recipe:




Edith's Sweet Dills:
Ingredients:
cucumbers
fresh dill
bell pepper
onion
celery salt
cold water
1 quart of white vinegar
4 cups of white sugar
1/4 cup pickling (coarse) salt


Directions:
Cut cucumbers either into sandwich slices or rounds, let stand in cold water in the fridge over night, you can use ice cubes to cool quickly. Then drain.
Heat the jars and in each 500 mL jar put in:
1 tsp celery salt
1 or 2 slices of onion or little pickling onions
a few slices of bell pepper
a head of dill
Then pack in the cucumbers
In a large pot add the quart of vinegar, 4 cups of sugar and 1/4 cup of salt. Bring to low boil then pour into jars leaving 1/2" headspace. Water bath as for raw packed pickles for your altitude (for me that's about 10 minutes). Leave sit for a month then enjoy.


It's hard to stay out of them until they are ready, luckily I still have a couple of last year's jars left.

I should add that for this amount of cucumbers I had to double the syrup.

I was able to use the dill from my garden and I had some green onions we forgot to harvest last year which are now huge so I used them for the onions in this recipe. I also managed to use 3 pickling cucumbers from my garden in these.