In a pickle?

Yesterday the hubby and his keen cucumber finding skills brought in another boat load of cukes. I have only weighed one bag at 14lbs so far. I think it should easily beat the 30lbs we picked last week. I may go out and pull up the vines. This is just too much. I thought downsizing from 6 rows to 2 would be just right. I guess I was wrong!

By the time I got out to help pick cucumbers the large dark clouds above the patch opened up and I had to run or rather walk fast to the house. The hubby stayed out thinking it would pass, but within minutes Zada and I watched him run to the house.  Seconds after he made it in it started to hail!!! Oh my stomach sank the moment I yelled oh *($% it’s hailing.  The hubby got out the umbrella and tried to move some of my flower baskets closer to the house. However, the garden is just too big to try and protect. So I just had to sit and wait. Luckily the hail was only pea size not the golf ball size that had ruined the garden a few years back. It also only lasted for about 5mins. The garden looks a little beat up, but I think everything is still okay for the most part. I still haven’t taken a close look at the tomatoes...and I don’t want to...lol

Last night I made a batch of cucumber relish. Last year when I made zucchini relish I chopped everything by hand. It took me a long time and resulted in a numb arm and hand...lol  This year I tried my broner slicer, since it is suppose to dice. However, once the cucumbers were seeded I don’t think there was enough “meat” to the cucumber to dice properly. I figured I would just chop by hand...but my good ole bad arm didn’t much care for that...gesh...Lol .So I figured I would break down and use my food processor. I like chunky relish so I wasn’t too keen on having finely chopped cukes from the processor. But boy let me tell you it sure the heck was a lot easier than chopping by hand! It had taken me 30mins to chop 3 cucumbers by hand and in 15mins I had 8 cups of chopped cucumbers, 4 cups of peppers and 1 cup of onions already to go.

My recipe said I would get 6 500ml jars. However, I only got 4 500ml. I seem to end up short most of the time. Does anyone else have that problem to?