On Sunday we tried something new here at the Little Grey Log Cabin: pickling. Inspired by my grandmother’s always fully-stocked cold room when I was a kid, I thought I’d try my hand at her dill pickle recipe.

This is key skill to add to your toolbox if you’re looking to live a more old-fashioned lifestyle. Not only does having preserves on-hand save money on weekly groceries, but it’s a part of homemaking that perhaps has been left by the wayside in recent years.

A special shoutout to my mum who came over early this morning to share some insight of how my grandmother and her did this back in the day. Although the half-bushel of cucumbers weren’t from our garden (we don’t have the capacity to grow this many!), they were Ontario-grown. The dill came straight from my herb garden, and the garlic from my step-sister’s farm!

After washing all the cucumbers, we quickly realised that if we didn’t slice them up, only about 4 whole cucumbers would fit in each jar because of the size I chose. Depending on the size of the cucumber, I either sliced in halves or quarters, and then we used a mix in each of the jars. This should give a good mix in each jar, and will prevent any preparation before serving (we plan to gift quite a few of these!).

Because of the sheer quantity, this took up most of the day. For reference, we started harvesting the dill around 9:30am, and didn’t finish the last water bath until 1:30pm; 4 hours all in. In total, 24 500mL jars and five 1L jars for a total of 29 (!!!) jars of dill pickles.

Next up, was a quick jar of pickled eggs and a few of pickled jalapeños. I’m quite happy that we were able to put the abundance of jalapeños coming from our garden to good use; today’s harvest was a total of 12 peppers, which yielded 4 jam jars (250mL).

Lastly, I had the stretch goal to make just one quick jar of pickled eggs which was a special request from Mr. Little Grey Log Cabin. I didn’t water bath these since they should be eaten up within the next week or so. An 84-year old relative shared her secret recipe and I couldn’t resist!

All in all, I’ve got 34 jars of pickled preserves to start off our cold room downstairs. We’ve got a ton of tomato plants in our backyard garden, so perhaps salsa is up next. Another idea was to do up some rhubarb jam since we’ve got a bounty of this as well. With preserving, the options are endless!