Garden Plans-Cucumbers

Planning the vegetable garden(continued).

We are going to continue with the planning process with cucumbers.

We will need two type of cucumbers.  The pickling cucumbers for canning and last year I was selling more “small” cucumbers than I was the slicing cucumbers.  We will make dill pickles, bread and butter pickles and pickle relish.  Other than pickles we will have to plant or buy red bell peppers, green bell peppers, onions and dill.  Since fresh dill is essential for dill pickles we will have to grow that as most grocery stores will not sell this and we are not close to a Market that sells fresh dill.

Valley Green Chicago Pickling	Thick,square ended, medium green thin fruits, 6 to 7 inches, 2 1/2 inch side.  Well warted, black spines.  Can be sown indoors 4-6 weeks prior to planting.	7 to 14	6	50 to 60		6	12
Burpee Straight Eight	A favorite white spine, even deeply colored symmetrically shaped fruits best picked with 8 inches long.	10 to 20 days	6	65-75 days		3	6
Spanish onions	This is an early maturing type of onion.  Bulbs are quite large when mature.  Best when started early in flats 6 to 8 weeks before trnasplanting to insure fully mature onions.  Very mild in flavor.		entire see pack	110 to 120 days	4 inches	all	all
America's Choice, California Wonder Green Peppers	Popular bell pepper with a mild, delicious flavor,  Fruits are lage, smooth and thick walled.	10 to 20 days plant indoors 8 weeks before frost free weather	6	72 after transplanting		6	6
Dill	Uniquely flavored leaves are used in salads, dips vinegars, and meat, fish and vegetable dishes.  The seeds are essential in many pickle recipes and are used to flavor baked goods, cheese and vinegar	24	24	65 to 70	1 inch	12	12

If you noticed in the above planting schedule the onions will not be maturing early enough to use in the relishes and salsa’s.  So we are going to have to find an onion that matures earlier than the one above if we want to use our garden onions for our canned goods.

Everything above starts maturing at the 6 weeks mark so we should be selling most of this in the Farmers Market about the 2^nd week of June.  We will can, on Sunday, any cucumbers that have not sold at the Farmers Market on Saturday into pickles and relishes.  These canned item need to set in the jars for about 4 weeks before the flavor is good so we should be selling our first relished and pickles about the middle of July. 

I do have some canned goods left from last year that I will take to the Farmers Market as soon as I start attending to sell Strawberries and according to the FDA these canned good are suggested to resell up to 2 years, but if sales go as good as last year I should run out of my canned goods before I start canning this year.