The counter is pretty full as you can see. I hit the local farmer's market yesterday early, and scored 2 15 pound bags of freshly picked pickling cucumbers, half a flat of local peaches since they are simply outstanding this year, and there is one day's take out of the henhouse. The cucumbers were picked right after dawn and were in the jars cooling by noon...it's hard to get 'em fresher than that! I grabbed a bunch of fresh dill so I can make some dilled mustard this week too...
I put up a bunch of half-gallon jars of the best garlic dills you've ever tasted, along with several quarts. We kieep a jar of these in the garage fridge, and my son-in-law eats them by the handful. This batch produced about 7 gallons of dill pickles, used 3 gallons of apple cider vinegar and ought to be just about right by Halloween...
The local peaches are particularly nice this year, and are the ones you have to go eat out on the picnic table, because you'll have juice dripping off of both elbows once you bite into it. I'm making a bit of peach chutney to stuff some pork with later this summer, and we'll be having cobbler soon too.
And today was our first five egg day!! One of our Black Jersey Giants (Oprah...pretty black feathers, big butt. The other is named Tyra...) has been honking like a goose for days, and was standing on the roost this morning, bellowing out of the windows at the top of her lungs that she was going to LAY AN EGG RIGHT NOW! And she did exactly nothing. I decided to put a nest egg out there, and sure enough, half an hour later she pushed out her first dinky little egg. It's there on the bottom right, and it weighed in at 37 grams or about 1 1/2 ounces. The on one it's left is a Rhode Island Red egg, the biggest to date, and it clocks in at 64 grams,our about 2/1/2 ounces!
Fresh food and fresh henfruit!
