Refrigerator Pickles

A garden update:

Much to my delight, my cucumber trellis is working fabulously!  I would highly recommend a trellis like this if you have limited space to grow vine produce.  It's a definite space saver...and it's pretty too.

Carson and I went on a short, four-day, vacation this past weekend.  When we left for vacation, the cucumber vines were covered in yellow flowers.  When we came back home, there were at least two  dozen of these tiny little cucumbers blossoming throughout.

Many of them were big enough to harvest.  We love fresh cucumbers...dip them in hummus, and I love them even better.  But, we won't eat this many cucumbers before they perish.  So, I decided to make refrigerator pickles out of them.

I snipped a few sprigs of dill from my herb garden, and crushed about 5 cloves of garlic from my new garlic stash.

I placed these in a large Mason jar, along with some freshly cracked pepper corns...for a little kick.

I chose to cut my cucumbers into spears instead of slices this time...but they are fabulous cut either way.

I packed the cucumbers as tightly into the jars as possible (I had enough cucumbers to make two jars), then I mixed up a 'brine' of sorts in a separate bowl, and funneled it into the jars.  My brine is simple:  (per jar) one cup of vinegar, one cup of water, one Tablespoon of sugar, and two teaspoons of salt.  This type of pickling must be refrigerated, because the jars aren't heat sealed. 

I will give them about 24 hours to gather flavor, but that's as long as I will wait to crunch into these delicious beauties!