"One cannot live on pickles alone."
LOL I greatly resemble this remark. My first try at canning was very enthusiastic, so much so that I still have years worth of blackberry jam and tuna from it. I have learned to appropriately scale my harvests to my consumption, or at least to try. I didn't realize three gallons of blackberries was more than I will spread on toast in a year, but I do now.
"...this year's pickles, my first ever, are all pretty bad."
This is also a lesson learned. A lot of the jam I made was horribly full of seeds, and for a year I was drudgily picking them out of my teeth. Fortunately the expensive wild caught tuna was not a bad recipe, and isn't $10/lb cat food.
I wish I had more than a fraction of your garden space. I need to adopt better indoor gardening but this will require opening an exterior wall in my home for reasons, and I cannot do that in winter and pretend to be a rational person. I have some very small crops I am maintaining just for the purpose of keeping seed coming for when I do have enough space to grow more than samples of onion, cabbage, beets, and many more delicious foods I want to eat regularly, like turnips, carrots and greens. However one problem I have is garden pests. Deer top the list, and I have erected a variety of mechanisms that seek to stop them from eating me out of house and home, short of harvesting the deer instead of tomatoes. European land snails are next on the list, and I strongly suspect I should harvest the delicious snails. There are few more delicious and expensive foods I could be harvesting, in fact. Finally come the worms, and the cabbage loopers are rivaling root miners in terms of poundage of waste.
I don't want to resort to poisons, and contraptions to exclude deer don't scale down to inverts. I can eat the snails, but not the maggots in my turnips, and the cabbage loopers and snails just make it impossible to grow any kind of bean or pea because they eat them before there's much more than a seedling. I reckon I can exclude such pests by growing indoors, and hope to get that going this spring.
Thanks!
Three gallons of blueberries! lol. Had we not had a terrible year for all things fruit bearing tree, I'd also have a gazillion too many pears canned!
So, a 6 foot run of deer fencing wouldn't keep out the deer? Maybe you guys have super deer? I know the damage they can do though.
those moments when
you walk into your garden
and find lifeless stalks
I like your turns-of-phrase. Your writing is always a delight to read.
Because of the tiny space I have available, the 6' fence keeps me out as well. Thank you for your kind words.