I have a favorite pickle recipe.  I’ve been making it for years.  This year I started with 24 cucumbers, 12 cups of vinegar and 12 cups of sugar, some peppers and onions along with some pickle spices (mustard seed, celery seed and a little cayenne pepper to give it a tiny bit of a kick) and a huge galvanized canning pot.  Everything was going well until I realized that this is a lot of pickles and I didn’t have enough canning jars ready.  In the middle of the preparations, I had to put things on hold and run out for more jars!

Now we have four cases of bread and butter pickles!

But that’s not all.

We also have wild blackberries growing all over the place — and now we have three cases of blackberry jam.  And I accidentally bought 30 pounds of blueberries — so now we have two cases of blueberry jam, 6 quarts of blueberry pie filling and two gallons of blueberries in the freezer. (I didn’t realize how many blueberries are in a 30 pound box when I said I’d take a box of them!)

And then there are still beans and beets to freeze and tomato sauce to can and squash to pick.  I think we won’t go hungry.