After my pickle-canning tutorial with WVU Agricultural Extension Agent and Gazette-Mail Garden Guru John Porter, I decided to pickle and can my own.
But I'm not John. While he learned to can in his mother's kitchen, when my mother started putting up vegetables in our home, I took it as a good opportunity to find somewhere else to be - outside, mostly. Summers were hot, and we didn't have air conditioning.
So I took the book John gave me, studied the recipe for bread and butter pickles he'd prepared, and then chose something that looked easier.
I opted for garlic and dill pickles, which had fewer steps, and I thought it might be more forgiving.
Unlike John's recipe, I didn't need to soak the sliced cucumbers in a mixture of ice and salt and didn't have to cook them in brine.
Also, I'd been worried about space. I didn't have the fully armed and operational kitchen found at the WVU Extension office in Kanawha City. I don't have the counter space, don't have a working dishwasher to sterilize jars and only two burners work on my stove.
So I improvised a little.
First, I sterilized my jars by boiling them in a huge pot I've never used for anything, while heating up water on the other burner.
After the jars boiled for about 15 minutes, I covered the pot, moved it over onto a couple of potholders and then started the canning bath.
With the burner free, I began to boil my brine.
As my canning bath heated up on one burner, I sterilized my lids in the boiling water using a small sieve my sister gave me to wash quinoa.
It took about 20 minutes for the water to come to a boil, a little less for the brine to heat up. But once I had both where I thought they needed to be, I started removing jars with the canning tongs and placing them on a towel.
As the recipe advised, I added fresh dill (you can get it at the Capitol Market), garlic and the cucumbers.
With the help of a funnel, I poured the pickling brine over the vegetables. Then I carefully fished lids out of the submerged sieve with a fork, placed them carefully over the mouths of the jars and then sealed the lids with rings.
The packaged jars went into the canning bath together, and then I watched the clock for 10 minutes.
The first batch seemed to have gone off without a hitch.
As the jars were set out on a towel to dry, the thin metal lids popped, signifying a seal, an indication that at least I'd gotten that part right.
The pickles looked pretty good, too. So good that I went ahead and tried out another recipe.
Because I was trying to be interesting, I grew a strange-looking round cucumber that looks a little like a lemon.
The plants are over-achievers and have nearly taken over the lower part of my garden. I had to do something with them and figured they might make a decent sweet pickle.
Following the recipe for sweet pickles, I washed and then sliced the yellow cucumbers and put them in a big plastic bowl, covered them and set them to the side.
In a few minutes, I was supposed to drain the hot water and cool the slices down with ice water - really simple stuff.
Things were going along just fine. I felt pretty good about how this was going to work out, but then the pickling brine went south.
The recipe called for a quart of vinegar and five cups of sugar.
The problem was the bag of sugar I picked up was infested by dozens of fruit flies, all of which were now floating lazily in a pool of vinegar.
After a certain, reasonable amount of cursing and swearing, I poured out the pot, threw away the rest of the sugar and started over with a new pot and a new bag.
The second attempt went off without a hitch, and the lemon cucumbers seemed to hold up
It felt like an accomplishment - a sweaty, messy accomplishment that left my house smelling like the bottom of a pickle barrel - but a real accomplishment.
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A little emboldened, I started looking into other ways to preserve food.
I thought about curing and smoking.
When I was a kid, my grandparents had a smokehouse on their farm. It was a little, one-room building behind their house that looked like a set from a horror film, but curing and smoking vegetables seemed not only impractical, but silly.
Who eats smoked zucchini?
Instead, I found Doug Koenig, the market manager at Monroe Farm Market in Monroe County. We talked a little about drying foods.
Doug and his wife joined the farm co-op about six months ago and haven't been farmers for much longer.
Before that, Doug was a U.S. Marine.
"I was a grunt," he said. "Then I was in aviation ordinance and quality assurance."
He worked on the air crew of a CH-46 helicopter.
After 10 years of service, the 31-year-old decided he didn't want to be a career soldier.
"My personal and political beliefs just didn't match with what I was doing," he said. "So I got out."
Farming seemed like a good career choice. It was very basic and had a clearly defined goal.
"You feed your neighbors," he said. "What's not to love about that?"
Doug and his wife moved to Virginia, where they started dabbling with farm life before following a farming mentor's path to West Virginia.
"The land was cheap," he said. "So we moved here, too."
They're still building their farm, which Doug said is very diversified. They raise goats and laying hens, have lots of garden space and a variety of fruit trees.
"We've made tons of peach and apple chips," he said. "We've also taken apples and made them into a sauce, added pureed berries and made a kind of bark using the bottom of our dehydrator.
"They're kind of like fruit roll-ups."
Doug said they use a dehydrator for a lot of things, but typically passive-dry their teas and spices.
"There's not much to it," he said. "You pick a place for your herbs, cut off what you need and hang them upside down."
Doug said they had a hook by a window where the couple strings up herbs.
I grew a single basil plant this year. I thought I could give that a try.
For my attempts at drying fruit, Doug recommended following the directions that came with whatever dehydrator I used.
"The manuals are usually very good," he said and then laughed. "And remember, Google is your best friend."
His one piece of advice was to not let the dried fruit sit in the dehydrator after it was done drying. It needs to be put away. Otherwise, it might not stay dried.
"We live in an old brick farm house," he explained. "It can get very humid and can pick up the ambient moisture. If that happens, you'll have to dehydrate more."
There weren't very many peaches left on my old peach tree. Between the weather and the endlessly hungry deer, I salvaged only two scraggly peaches, hardly enough to bother with, but Kroger had a special - peaches for 99 cents a pound, which seemed pretty cheap.
I turned again to the book and the section on drying fruit.
As recommended, I blanched the fruit using a bamboo steamer I got for Christmas, sliced the peaches in half and put the halves in the trays of my dehydrator.
There wasn't much else to do except plug the thing in and find something else to do.
Unlike canning, the dehydrator doesn't require constant supervision. If it did, nobody would bother. It took half a day to dry out 10 peaches.
A man could go mad staring at the machine and listening to the fan inside drone on and on and on, but even in half a day, the electric dehydrator, compared to a solar system, was lightning fast.
A solar dehydrator could take days.
After the peaches were dried, the book told me to put the shriveled fruit in a sealed container for a week. If moisture appeared on the glass over the next seven days, then the fruit needed to go back in the machine for another round.
Actually, that seemed about perfect to bring to the office for a taste test.
Reach Bill Lynch at
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