Weekend Canning: Corn & Pickles

My husband and I live on 10 acres of land, but only a very small part of it has been cleared so far.  We're planning on clearing around 3 acres this fall, and then I'll set up the GARDEN OF MY DREAMS and have room to garden my heart out!

In the meantime, I couldn't put in a garden this year because the big equipment that will be used this fall will have to go right through my current tiny garden area over by the side of the house.  So that means this year I've been getting my fresh produce from friends and the local Durham farmer's market.

This weekend they finally had sweet summer corn!  Who doesn't love the first corn of the summer??  I knew I wanted to put up a good number of pints for making soups and stews this winter, so I loaded up 20 ears of corn.  Once it was weighted, it turns out that was 10 pounds worth of corn.  Man!  I was going to can SO MUCH corn!!

Except... once I got it home and managed to finagle the corn off the cob (which was harder to do than I thought it would be and little pieces of corn ended up all over the kitchen floor, sad to say) I only ended up with 4 pints of corn.  Wow.

On the other end of the canning spectrum, I also canned some garlic dill pickles.  I have been looking and looking for the tiny cucumbers my grandmother used to make her pickles, but I guess unless you have your own plants and can pick them right away, that just isn't going to happen.  So I settled for the smallest cucumbers I could find and ended up with a handful of cucumbers.  Surely this won't add up to much!

Surprise again!  I ended up with 3 pints (I know, I know... not a huge amount, but still more than I thought it would be!).  Once I crammed in plenty of garlic cloves and heads of dill, it didn't take too many of the cucumbers to fill up a pint jar.  YAY!

Again, the hardest part of the whole thing is the waiting.  We're supposed to wait a whole week before we crack open the pickles and try them.  We'll see if we last that long...