Remember our parents and grandparents used 15% Vinegar for pickling! Now it’s only 5% Vinegar and you are cutting it 3:1!! Not a good idea! You have 2.5% Vinegar just using a 1:1 ratio! Your canning salt ratio needs to be 1 measuring cup per gallon of brine (vinegar + water combined). i don’t know if you are boiling them on a low boil for a minimum of 12-14 minutes for ”low-temperature pasturization” and making certain they ”set up properly” or stay sealed prior to storing them on the shelves to cure for 30 days, or if you are planning on refrigerating them once you finish canning and allow them to cool down! if you fail to boil them and place them on the shelf, they will develop a botulism that can be fatal! Just my thoughts! Been putting up pickles for over 40 years and two of my proteges have used my recipe and won the Blue in the Minnesota State Fair 2007 & 2014

Andymath, I like the following refrigerator pickles. I don't care for very sour pickles, and am not very fond of dill pickles either, but I like these: Refrigerator pickles THE FRUGÂS PICKLES In a saucepan, heat on low until thoroughly dissolved: 1 C water 1 tsp salt 1/2 C white vinegar 1/2 C sugar then stir in: 1/2 tsp celery seed 1/2 tsp mustard seed pour the above mix over: 2 cukes, thinly sliced (we use english cukes which are very thin-skinned and don't bother to peel them) 1 yellow onion, thinly sliced cover and refrigerate several hoursÂthese will keep a couple of weeks with no loss of crispness These are pretty good for dill pickles, they're a sweet dill, kind of different: Sweet Dill Refrigerator Pickles 2 cups sugar 2 cups vinegar 2 cups water 1/4 cup salt 3 quarts sliced unpeeled cucumbers 1 large onion, sliced 3/4 to 1 cup minced fresh dill In a saucepan, combine sugar, vinegar, water and salt. Bring to a boil and boil 1 minute. In a large nonmetallic container, combine cucumbers, onion and dill. Pour dressing over; cool. Cover and refrigerate at least 3 days before serving. Stir occasionally. Yield: 3-1/2 quarts. Finally, here's a spicy one that Elery wants me to try, I haven't made it yet but I'm going to. It's from AllRecipes. Spicy Refrigerator Dill Pickles 12 3 to 4 inch long pickling cucumbers 2 cups water 1 3/4 cups white vinegar 1 1/2 cups chopped fresh dill weed 1/2 cup white sugar 8 cloves garlic, chopped 1 1/2 tablespoons coarse salt 1 tablespoon pickling spice 1 1/2 teaspoons dill seed 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or to taste 4 sprigs fresh dill weed Directions: 1. In a large bowl, combine the cucumbers, water, vinegar, chopped dill, sugar, garlic, salt, pickling spice, dill seed, and red pepper flakes. Stir, and let stand at room temperature for 2 hours, until the sugar and salt dissolve. 2. Remove the cucumbers to three wide mouth jars, placing 4 cucumbers into each jar. Ladle in the liquid from the bowl to cover. Place a sprig of fresh dill into each jar, and seal with lids. Refrigerate for 10 days before eating. Use within 1 month. Happy Canning. And Pickling!! Annie

Thanks for all replies! Long post with specific methods & ingredients below! OK, what I did was stick 13 jars on a cookie sheet in the oven at around 200-225. Then, I had the canner heating up and 3 jars in it with some water so they don't float. When simmering, I took the 3 out of the canner and dumped the water into a bowl for the lids--I already microwaved some water for 4 minutes then added the lids & added to it the water from the 3 jars to keep the lids hot. Then I filled the 3 jars, put lids & bands on, and put them into the simmering canner. Then took 2-3 more at a time from the oven and repeated until all were filled and in the canner. I understood what Ken was saying about the flat sides against each other, as well as Shirley's reply--if flat sides touched, they wouldn't curve. But I realized he meant all the flat sides facing each other, as opposed to the corners facing each other or mixed directions. I tried many different ways, thinking it was like a jigsaw puzzle and only 1 way to fit 10, but obviously newer jars only can fit 9, which is a little stupid for fairly new canners! Don't know who to blame--the canner mfr or the jar mfr. How many current pint jars fit in a Mirro brand? Zabby, Annie's Salsa was the thing I made more than anything else this year--I think 41 pints + leftovers (as opposed to 4 quarts of spaghetti sauce as an example, though still have a gallon of tomato puree frozen to use for something.) I used to go thru maybe 1-2 jars of Chi-Chi's salsa per YEAR, but Annie's is so good that I go through a pint per SITTING! I know it's subject to modification, like with the # of jalapenos, ratio of onions to peppers, etc. I have made maybe 5 batches and all came out great and I wouldn't say any 2 were identical! Some I used different types of peppers to get different heat levels, and some I used just the paste and no sauce. All turned out great. This last batch had (for a double batch) about 5 cups mix of Red Bull & Ailsa Craig white onions, about 3 cups total of an Orange Bell, a red-ripe Big Bertha huge sweet bell, 2-3 red-ripe Joe E. Parker NuMex peppers, 1 red Big Jim NuMex, 1-2 brown Eclipse NuMex, 4 red Jumbo Jals, 3 red Primavera lo-heat jals, and 2 Yellow Peru hot peppers. For the black pepper, I doubled it for the double batch, less about a teaspoon, then ground up a dried jalapeno & a dried Boldog Hungarian Spice pepper in a cheap coffee bean grinder from ebay. For a double batch, I doubled the cumin. Half cup canning salt instead of 2/3c. I used 3/4 cup apple cider vinegar and a half cup sugar--I started with a quarter but then figured after the vinegar & chipotle I added another quarter almost. For the paste & sauce, I used 30oz of paste but no sauce, but 24oz of diced tomatoes & it's juices from 1. I only had about 1/4 cup of cilantro left after chopping just the leaves, probably could have used more if I had more, though I can't stand the smell or taste of it alone. I think I realize now that my yield is always less than I expect (even after draining the heirloom tomatoes many times before measuring) because I start heating the salsa mixture before I have the jars and canner ready. I used almost a gallon of chopped tomatoes, plus added 1 drained can of diced tomatoes and 1 16oz can of diced tomatoes with the juice. I think the heating breaks down the diced tomatoes and the water evaporates, thus leaving less. I must be cooking it too long... I ended up with twelve full pints instead of 16, and maybe less than a half cup left in the pot--though the ingredients add up to over 8.5 quarts I think. Next time I'll reverse the procedure and heat the mix up after the canner & jars are ready. I had extra jars ready that I didn't need. As for the Ball Hot Chipotle seasoning, it smelled great when I opened up the packet, but I think a packet only makes like 4 pints or so, so it probably got diluted in a double batch, though it did taste great before I poured it into the jars, but can't say if that was from the Ball seasoning or my pepper assortment & fresh ground chile powder. Mark

A lot depends on what our weather does. Most years my watermelons last a bit more deeply into fall than muskmelons, true cantaloupes and other miscellaneous melons do. Once the temperatures drop substantially and the daylength is a littler shorter every day, the melons slow down in growth and can take a longer time to mature. However, they will eventually mature. I am about to take out my muskmelon plants and watermelon plants in the front garden so I can clean up that bed, but I'm going to let the watermelon plants out back go on for as long as they can. Last year we harvested a couple dozen watermelons in October and November, and the flavor was fine but the melons were, for the most part, smaller than fruit on the same vines had been back in the summer months. I just leave the plants alone and let them do their thing. I don't cover them up on cold nights, I don't pinch off blossoms and I don't tip-prune. Our average last frost date is in mid-November, but sometimes the first frost hits in latest September and sometimes not until mid-December, so I'd rather let the plants go on producing for as long as Mother Nature will allow. I missed a couple of melons last year when I harvested the last of them on the day before the first freeze was expected to occur that night, and I didn't find them until 3 or 4 weeks after the first freeze. By the time I found the melons buried under a lot of dead, brown foliage, they'd been exposed to overnight lows as low as 18 degrees and I was surprised they weren't rotting. One wasn't any good. It was smaller and likely was a long way from maturing when the freeze hit. The other one was large and probably was completely mature when we froze, and its very thick rind protected the flesh inside (which surprised me). It was very tasty, but not quite as tasty as summer melons from the same plant that matured in much hotter weather. So, even if your melon has time to reach its mature size and to ripen fully on the vine, the flavor might not be as good as you remember because it matured under cooler conditions. You could try to keep the melons warmer by putting a low tunnel (PVC or EMT hoops covered with clear plastic) over them, but be aware that if you do that, you have to watch them closely because the greenhouse effect can roast the plants to death, and a lack of air flow can encourage fungal diseases. If I was going to to that, I'd probably pull the plastic back off the hoops during the day and pull it back over the hoops in late afternoon to hold in the heat during the night. And, I'd make the hoops go a foot or two above the top of the trellis. If your clear plastic is too close to the plants even in cool autumn weather, they plants can get too hot and be damaged or even killed. My garden does pay for itself most years. I generally can about 600 pints of food and fill up 2 or 3 deep freezes, and then have onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes and winter squash in dry storage for the winter months. However, it also costs more money to process and store more food, so the longer the garden is producing heavily, the more money it costs us in terms of processing and storing the excess part of the harvest that we cannot eat fresh. It has taken me many years, though, to arrive at the point where I feel like the garden does pay for itself......and, even if it didn't, I'd have a big garden anyway. I don't garden just as a way to save money in the food budget. I do it because I enjoy it (and I have about 100 other reasons) and I like knowing how our food was grown (as naturally as possible) and I enjoy sharing the produce with our friends and family. Even though I put up a lot of the harvest to eat later on, my favorite thing to do is to eat fresh from the garden in season. You know, when asparagus is in season, I'd never go to the store and buy vast quantities of it so we could eat it once or twice a day for weeks on end, but when it is coming from our own garden, we do eat it once or twice a day for weeks on end. It is the same thing with everything else---something like melons could be on the menu once or twice a week if we didn't have a garden. With a garden? They can be on the menu daily at the height of the season, and often I have enough to share. I often feed the chickens a melon of their own in very hot weather, and sometimes slice one up for the deer as well. A large and highly productive garden lets you do things with food that you wouldn't do if you were paying grocery store prices for that food. Tim wouldn't be happy with me if I went to the grocery store and bought a melon for the chickens!