The joy of pickling

We have beans, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, butternut squash, plums and strawberries growing in our garden.

I dug up and replanted half the flower beds with food when lockdown started, during a moment of panic about where all this was going.

We also began a store of tinned goods in the cellar. Don’t all shout at once. I didn’t panic buy, and I didn’t waste a morsel. I shopped very frugally at first and only bought what we needed.

But once the shelves started stocking up I began a modest doomsday store consisting of tins of sweetcorn, soup, ravioli, ham and sardines, along with jars of passata, frankfurters and gherkins. Why do we buy giant gherkins at times of crisis? I think it must be something to do with the homesteading spirit that lies dormant in all of us.

I was a big fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was a child, and read all the books in the Little House on the Prairie series. I have it in my head that when Pa was busy chopping wood, Ma would pickle and preserve vegetables for the winter months. So I planted up the garden with fruit and veg, hoping I might have enough left at the end of summer to start some pickling of my own.

Necessity being the mother of all invention, I have been seeing all sorts of possibilities. I discovered we already have a plum tree, which I grew from a tiny sapling no bigger than a twig that my mother gave to me as a cutting from her tree to plant at the cottage when we moved in three years ago.