So I like hearing about people who live (or are trying to live) the same type of lifestyle. No two DIY families are exactly alike. There seem to be things that some of us consider to be absolutely necessary to do ourselves that others have no problem letting someone else do for them. And sometimes, you get ideas from other DIYers that you never would have thought of yourself — and that is magic because it’s great to get excited about a new project.

If you’re interested in doing more things for yourself, in trying something you never thought you could do yourself, Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World will quite likely inspire you to take that next step. Frauenfelder, MAKE: magazine’s editor-in-chief, chronicles his journey to live a more authentic life by doing things for himself. From hacking an espresso maker to get the perfect brew to rehabbing a chicken coop, keeping chickens, and growing a garden, Frauenfelder shows both the ups and inevitable downs of doing things yourself. The only thing that disappointed me was that Frauenfelder sometimes seemed to give up a little too easily (the homeschooling chapter drove me nuts, for example.) But I’m more stubborn than about 98% of the population, so there’s always that.

What I liked the best about Made by Hand is that Frauenfelder reminds us again and again that screwing up is not just part of the DIY lifestyle; it is essential to it. If you’re afraid of screwing up (and obsessed with “perfection”) the DIY lifestyle is definitely not for you. Perfect is boring. Perfect says “I’m done! Perfect. Nothing more to do here!” Who the hell wants to live like that? I want life messy, hectic, imperfect. I like my gardens ugly, my hems slightly askew, and my bread ever so slightly undercooked. These things give me something to strive for.

I enjoyed this book a lot. Another one that you may be interested in if you want to read more about DIYers is Jenna Woginrich’s Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life — a great book, beautifully written. Either one will make you want to bake something, build something, or grow something. That’s never, ever a bad thing.

Damn, were they good. She never made them again, though, and we went back to store-bought.

Fast forward twenty years or so. Pickles saw me through all four pregnancies. Some women get cravings for ice cream and pickles — I just wanted pickles. My husband has referred to me getting somewhat “scary” with the pickles a few times during my pregnancy with Elizabeth. I have no idea what he means.

Suffice it to say, I love me some pickles. I planted four varieties of cucumbers this year, three of which are pickling cucumbers. (An aside: a couple people have asked me what makes a pickling cucumber a pickling cucumber. The simple answer is that they have thinner, bumpier skin — the better to absorb all of that lovely brine with!) The pickling cukes are coming on strong now, so I decided it was high time to make up a few pints of dill pickles. I used this recipe because, as written, it’s good for making a small batch of pickles (three to four pints) but, even better — you can halve everything, and make just a jar or two if you don’t have that many cucumbers on hand.

First, you need to assemble your equipment:

You need a boiling water canner (if you don’t have one, a stainless steel stockpot will do. A cotton dishtowel folded and laid inside the pot will help stabilize the jars), pint jars, rings, and new lids. **If you want to forego the boiling water processing all together, you can also make refrigerator pickles with this recipe. If you do that, you can use any clean jar you want, and you don’t have to worry about having a pot to process your jars in. I’ll explain more later.

Not necessary, but it’s also helpful to have jar tongs, a magnetic lid lifter, and a jar funnel.

Fill the big pot so that the surface of the water is two inches higher than the tops of your jars. Place jars and lids in the pot (you can do lids in a separate pot, or the same one as your jars — doesn’t matter) and bring the water to a boil to sterilize everything.

While your jars are sterilizing, it’s time to assemble your ingredients.

You’ll need:
2 cups of white vinegar
2 cups of water (tap water is fine)
2 tablespoons of salt (pickling or kosher — not iodized table salt)
4 heads of fresh dill, or 4 tsp of dill seeds
4 cloves of garlic
8 to 10 cucumbers

In a saucepan, combine the vinegar, water, and salt, and heat over high. You want to bring this mixture to a boil. Meanwhile, start preparing your cukes. Cut a bit off of each end, if necessary, to ensure that the pickles will be about an inch shorter than your jar.

You can also cut them into halves or quarters if you want.

Once your cucumbers are ready and your brine is boiling, it’s time to get ready to add everything to the jars. Remove the jars (carefully!) from the boiling water canner. Add a head of dill and a clove of garlic to each jar.

Then, start packing your cukes in. You want to jam them in pretty tightly. This keeps them from floating in the brine.

As you can see, my nine cucumbers was only enough for three pints of pickles. That’s fine, it just means I’ll have some brine left over. Once you have them packed in, it’s time to pour the hot brine into the jars. Do this slowly, and use a jar funnel if that makes it easier for you. You want to fill the jars, leaving 1/2 inch of headspace at the top.

Use a flat spatula, butter knife, or bamboo skewer, and press the cukes together to try to release any air bubbles trapped in your jar. If you find that the level of the brine has fallen after doing this, top it up to keep your 1/2 inch of headspace.

Wipe the rims of your jars with a clean, damp cloth, set the lids on, and tighten the rings. You don’t have to go crazy tightening it — just finger-tight is good enough. The seal doesn’t come from the rings at all, but from the lid itself being vacuum sealed on as the contents of the jars cool after processing.

Place your jars into your boiling water canner, and process for ten minutes. Lift them out, carefully, and set them on a counter to cool. They’ll be quite warm for a few hours yet.

You’ll start to hear the lids make popping sounds. This means they’re sealing properly. After about an hour, all of your lids should have sealed. If you press on them and they’re solid, they’ve sealed right. If the lid still pops up and down, you don’t have a good seal. You can either re-process the jar in boiling water, or just put them in the fridge and eat them within a month. Properly sealed jars will keep for a year.

If you want to do away with the boiling water processing all together, simply add the cukes, dill, and garlic to any jar, pour boiling brine over it, cover, and let it cool down to room temperature. Then put your pickles in the fridge and eat within a month.

As you can see, it’s not difficult. And believe me, the flavor is definitely worth the effort!

Disclaimer: When you know you’re going to be photographing every step while cooking something, suddenly everything starts to look WAY neater than it ordinarily would. I am a very messy cook, and any hint at organization is merely a farce put on for the camera. But it’s ok — they turn out great whether you’re a messy cook or not

Pickling Resources:

While this is a basic recipe I found online a few years ago (and it’s great!) my favorite book about pickling and canning right now is Homemade Living: Canning & Preserving with Ashley English: All You Need to Know to Make Jams, Jellies, Pickles, Chutneys & More. It’s a beautiful book full of well-written recipes that definitely inspired me to try different things in my kitchen. Definitely worth a look.

As you can see from the post, I’m still using traditional canning lids. You may have heard that these types of lids are lined with BPA — this is a concern for many of us, myself included. I do have some reusable, BPA free lids on order, but they haven’t arrived yet. If you’re interested, here is a source that Julia from Snarky Vegan shared with me.

For more pickle-y goodness, please check out this post I wrote for Planet Green: 20 Pickle Recipes to Help You Preserve Summer’s Bounty.

As it is, to date I have nothing but glowing praise for the folks at Hort Couture. They know what they are doing, without a doubt.

My first impression of Hort Couture started with the web, as I know it has for many other garden bloggers. Their web site is beautiful, they have a good presence on Facebook, and every communication I’ve had with them has been very professional. So we’re off to a good start.

Then came the shipment. I’ve had plants shipped to me before, sometimes from professional growers, sometimes from fellow gardeners. I’ve never received a shipment of plants as beautiful as this one. Not only were the plants well-secured (no soil dumping out all over the place, no broken stems or bruised foliage) but they looked as fresh as if they’d just been boxed an hour ago. The large coconut coir pellets the plants were grown in were nicely moist, but not sopping wet. A lot of care went into how these plants were shipped, and I appreciated it.

Now: the plants. I received three different types of plants. They were:
**’Black Krim’ tomatoes (They sent me tomatoes. I love them already!)
**Calibrachoa CATWALK
**’La Crema’ Sage

And the plants are absolutely thriving. I planted the ‘Black Krim’ tomatoes in my sideyard garden, where they are adding to the annual July tomato jungle. They are full of healthy looking green tomatoes – I can’t wait to start harvesting them!

The Calibrachoa are planted in my awesome chicken planter. I love the way they spill out and over the sides. I have to admit that I smile at this planter/Calibrachoa combo every time I walk past it and into the sideyard garden. The plants are healthy, and have been blooming non-stop since late May. I want to grow these again, without a doubt.

I added the three sturdy little ‘La Crema’ sage plants to my herb bed. They have been through drought, being stomped on by toddlers, and going from a partly shaded setting to being in blazing sunlight all day due to my tree being cut down. They have held up beautifully — tough and pretty — two things I definitely admire in a plant.

All in all, I am very impressed with Hort Couture. I’ll update again before the end of summer to show you how everything looks as the season progresses.

Mandatory Disclaimer: I was provided plants for review by the company, with the understanding that if I wrote a review, it would be an honest one.

After he pruned the forsythias, my husband put the longest branches to good use supporting some beans we’d just planted. (Yes, I swooned. Clearly we were made for each other )

I planted this container hoping that the ‘Spitfires’ would trail over the edges of the container, as I had read that they made a nice trailing plant. But I’m finding that it was a bad idea to try to turn a climbing plant into a trailing plant. The nasturtiums are about a foot long now, and are doing their very best to do what they’re supposed to do: climb. They are growing upright, not trailing. I’m sure that once they get longer, gravity will take over and they’ll have no choice but to start trailing over the edges of the pot. But right now, it looks kind of funny, what with everything standing at attention like that.

The blooms are gorgeous, though.

I haven’t fertilized since the last time I posted, mainly because I didn’t want the plants to start getting too lanky. They haven’t seemed to need it — they’ve been growing very well. I am having a bit of a problem with something eating the leaves, but the damage is pretty minimal so I’m just going to keep an eye on it.

Hopefully by next month, my “adolescent” nasturtiums will grow out of their awkward phase, and we’ll see some trailing

I’m growing Nasturtium ‘Spitfire’ for the GROW project. Thanks to Renee’s Garden for the seeds.

I make chive blossom vinegar, rosemary vinegar, and basil vinegar almost every year, all with a white wine vinegar base. As I mention over at Planet Green, the process could not be simpler: get a very clean bottle or jar, fill it with at least 1/2 cup herbs that you’ve washed and patted dry, top it off with the vinegar of your choice, cover, and let steep for at least a week. Then you can strain out the herbs and re-bottle the vinegar.

I use my herbal vinegars mostly for making vinaigrette, but they’re also insanely good if you’re one of those who sprinkles vinegar on your french fries (a habit learned from my mom that I still get an occasional craving for).

The thing that intrigues me most about making herbal vinegars is the flavor combinations you can come up with. A few vinegar/herb combos that I will be trying:
**Apple cider vinegar with dill, mustard seed, lemon balm, and garlic
**Champagne vinegar with “lemony” herbs — lemon balm, lemon thyme, lemon grass, and lemon verbena
**Red wine vinegar with rosemary, sage, basil and garlic (how awesome would that be to dress a salad accompanying lasagna? Yum…)

If you’re interested in learning more about different flavor combinations for your homemade herbal vinegars, check out this page about herbal vinegars by Johnny’s Selected Seeds (PDF) — the combinations above were suggestions I found there, and there are many, many more including herbal vinegars featuring flowers.

So I hope that when I tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed Chris McLaughlin’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Composting,
you won’t write this off as one friend patting another on the back. The CIG to Composting is an educational, enjoyable read that will make even the most reticent composter want to get out there and build a bin of their own.

McLaughlin’s encouraging voice comes through loud and clear on each and every page of this well-written tome. While some may argue that it’s not possible to make a topic such as composting interesting, this book is sure to change their minds (another book that comes to mind is Stu Campbell’s classic Let It Rot!– another fun read for beginning composters.)

Whatever your question about composting, you’re sure to find an answer in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Composting. Here are just a few of the topics covered:

–Why Composting is a Good Hobby
–Composting Myths
–Greens and Browns
–Maintaining the Compost Pile
–Items to Compost
–Hot vs. Cold Composting
–Vermicomposting
–Creative Composting Ideas

And for just a sample of why I enjoy this book so much, I’d like to offer you this tip from the book. I especially like this one because it takes one of the biggest uncertainties out of the equation. I am often asked “how much “green” and how much “brown” material should I add? Here is Chris’ simple, effective answer:

“Skip the math. An easy rule of thumb is to put half carbon (brown stuff) and half nitrogen (green stuff) into your compost pile to begin with. Then let the pile tell you what to toss in next. Whatever you do, don’t stress over it; compost happens.”

Amen!

About the Author: Chris McLaughlin has been an avid gardener for 30 years and became a Master Gardener in 2000. She also has a certification from the National Wildlife Federation as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat Steward. Chris is a regular contributor at VegetableGardener.com (the sister site to Taunton’s Fine Gardening), is a San Francisco Gardening Examiner for Examiner.com, and is the editor for the Home Gardening page at Foodie Mama.

Disclaimer: I was provided with an advanced review copy of this book by the publisher with the understanding that the decision to review the book, and the contents of that review, were solely my own. This review encompasses my own opinion of the book, and has been influenced in no way by the publisher or the fact that they provided a copy for review.