Twice-pickled

This has not been a good year for cucumbers. For the past several years, I have grown Armenian cucumbers. These are not cucumbers at all botanically, but rather a variety of muskmelon. I don't like them quite as much as real cucumbers--they have a faint taste of muskmelon that is detectable when eating the Armenian cucumbers raw--but they have the great advantage of never getting bitter. Even when they grow to huge sizes, they're never bitter. This was a frequent problem I had with true cucumbers. Also, the Armenian cucumbers make excellent refrigerator pickles, which is my main use for cucumbers.

This year, I planted the Armenian cucumbers, and then I decided to try again with pickling cucumbers. I noticed early in the summer that the grasshoppers had eaten only the cucumber vines that were already climbing. They had left the vines still low on the ground. I think it was the Armenian cucumber vines they ate, because I have zero Armenian cucumbers.

I am getting some cucumbers, but they are almost all bitter. Predictably. So I haven't made any pickles from them.

However! One of the former teachers at school showed up to the county fair with lots of cucumbers and mentioned she's been getting great quantities. So I texted her to ask if she would be willing to sell me some cucumbers so I could make pickles. She responded that she wouldn't sell them, but she'd be happy to take some pickles.

Thus, the year's first refrigerator dills have been stowed away.

We already ate one of the pint jars of dill pickles. Rather than throw away the pickling liquid, however, I re-heated it in the microwave and used it to pickle some carrot ribbons.

I do this a lot with the liquid from the pickled onion slivers I almost always have in the refrigerator now. When I finish the onions the first time, I either re-heat the liquid and pickle more onions, or I pickle (store) radish slices.

Pickle trio.

This way I always have some kind of pickle on hand. I only use the pickling liquid once more before dumping it, but at least I get more than one use out of it. I was dismayed to see a gallon of white vinegar priced at over four dollars last week at the store, so I feel like the less of it I have to use, the better. 

Didn't vinegar used to be cheap? I feel like even the gallon of vinegar was like two or three dollars not too long ago. But maybe I'm misremembering.

Anyway. We have pickles, and that makes everyone happy.

Snapshots: Come Walk With Me

We haven't checked in on the horses in awhile. I wonder what they're up to . . .

Grazing, as usual.

This is what it looks like in our almost-ghost village.

Dead trucks.

Dead roads to nowhere.

When I was in town on Friday, I parked next to a truck almost as old as the one in the above photo, although this one was still on the road.

Barely. How does one do this to a truck?

It's green-chile-roasting season in New Mexico. You can buy giant sacks of green chiles in the grocery store and bring them right out to the parking lot to be roasted.

The chile-roasting area at this store is cordoned off by upside-down shopping carts.

I didn't do anything too interesting with flowers this week. I'm pretty much in "all sunflowers, all the time" right now. This is what I did for the altar today.

More apricot branches, more sunflowers, and kochia seed heads.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.