Pickles, pickles, and... MORE pickles?!

Aren't they beautiful? Seven pint jars of Bread & Butter pickles, 1 pint jar and 12 half pint jars of Sweet Relish, and 9 pint jars of Garlic Dill Pickles. We've given a few of these jars to our family members.

Homemade pickles are the only reason why I grow cucumbers. I have not eaten a fresh cucumber from my garden at all this year.

Last week I cut off all the baby pickles from my dying cucumber plant. I had enough for about a half pint of Sweet Gerkins! I just put it in a pint jar though, because that's what I had. Extra pickle juice is never a bad thing. This brought my pickle jar count up to 30.

I thought my pickling days were over for the year. But instead, Steve's aunt gave us a HUGE bucket of cucumbers from her garden! I haven't weighed it out, but I'm guessing it's at least 12 lbs.

I'll never complain about more pickles. Unfortunately though, I was out of half pint jars and only had a few pint jars left. Most stores are sold out of jars and won't be getting more in, but luckily I was able to find some.

I plan on making more sweet relish and maybe some dill relish with these! One can never have too many pickles.

My Absence

It's been a while since I posted something. I'd like to tell you that I was just too busy with housewife stuff (which is true - canned 10 jars of pasta sauce and 29 jars of pickles, and made cold process soap), or that there have been some personal issues (also true - my husband, myself, and our oldest dog have had health issues in the past month. I even hit a milestone and had my very first surgery! Nothing serious; it was elective), but that's not the biggest reason.

The big reason why I haven't updated is that I realized how ugly my blog looked in a blog reader. My pictures are all out of proportion which causes the text to become hard to read. I personally do a lot of my blog reading through a blog reader (RIP Google Reader, you were the best), so I definitely want to make this reading format better.

You know how on the professional blogs their pictures look so nice? They have two or three related pictures side by side in a nice collage. I wanted to do that. So I told myself that I would update all my old pictures before I posted anything new. I just didn't know how to edit my photos into those nice collages. I refuse to buy into the iStuff lifestyle, and I assumed all that iStuff had built-in photo editing programs that can do this. I based this assumption on pictures I've seen from friends with iPhones. I tried to find a program that I could download onto my Ubuntu desktop that would allow me to easily edit my photos, but I couldn't find anything. I tried making a collage template in Gimp, but I couldn't get it to look the way I wanted it to.

Then a few weeks ago I found this website PicMonkey. It's everything I've been looking for! It's not a program to download, it's completely web based. I just upload my photos, put them in the collage, then download it to my computer. So now that I've found this I plan on fixing up the blog.

I'm not trying to be a professional blogger, or the next Pinterest sensation with beautiful photos of food and pretty text overlay. I just want to share my information and hope that it helps someone on a similar path. I'm not trying to make money off of this, and I don't want to bombard my readers with ads ("Buy this!" "Spend your money here!" "How can your life be complete without buying this?!"). I don't agree with most advertising. I've worked in retail, and I hated being told to upsell people. So this may not be the prettiest of blogs, but I'm trying.