Timing your garden for pickling/canning

I'm starting to plan my garden/think about buying seeds, and I'm wondering what other people do.

I really like pickling. But trying to time maturity dates so that dill + cucumbers + onions/garlic + hot peppers are all available AT THE SAME TIME is something I've never managed yet. So I end up with store bought imported products in my pickles! Dill, in particular is both very expensive and very poor quality from the grocery store, and sometimes impossible to find. It's also really quick to bolt/set seeds.

It seems like things mature in the order of dill ->beans -> cucumbers -> hot peppers -> garlic/onions.

How do you manage this? Do you succession plant your dill, or use different varieties with different maturity dates, or prune or ?

oh man. dill is my downfall. it bolts in about 30 minutes, and I can never get the timing right. I keep saying I am going to freeze it but then I end up using the frozen dill for other things. I keep trying to grow it year round but it seems to attract All the Bugs. ugh.

Tereza - I'm so glad I'm not the only one with dill issues. As a kid in a much colder climate, dill grew 3 ft tall, and self seeded in a cold climate randomly throughout the garden. You didn't have to plant dill, it was just there. Now, it grows 1 ft tall, bolts, and tries to die. I was feeling like a pretty unsuccessful gardener/like I was using a really wimpy cultivar since I'm not even able to grow dillWEED successfully.

climates are tricky things. People are in awe of the things I can grow, but I fall down on what I would consider simple.... everyone has their own challenges I suppose.

Some years ago when I was new to Brazil I pulled the car over when I saw a huge dill plant growing in a yard, made a scandal til someone came outside to talk to me. They must have thought I was on drugs, this crazy lady super excited about their plant (they were not proud of their 5-foot tall plant, were barely even aware it was there). I was at this point so excited to get in there and get some seeds that I was probably making a fool of myself. I got the seeds and then immediately realized from the smell that it was a fennel plant. Ah, the embarrassment. Fennel grows enormous here (not bulby, but rather tall, like a queen anne's lace, almost), dill does not. Sigh.

Pickle the dill 1st or use a dehydrated version and then add that to your cucumber.

Bolting on dill is perfect, it's the flowers you should be using for pickles anyway. I'm in one of those cold climates you're talking about I can plant dill in May and harvest the same plants (bolted of course) through until august, where I can plant more and get a new crop of leaves in September.

Garlic should be easy. it's finished before anything else apart maybe from the dill is done, so just use some from the cupboard, and onions, well if you just want some for flavouring, they don't need to be dried and ready for storage to use. Of course if you want to pickle them then you will have to wait. Since the onions we grow as day-length sensitive there isn't any way to move when they are ready, so everything would have to match them.

Skandi Rogers wrote:Bolting on dill is perfect, it's the flowers you should be using for pickles anyway. I'm in one of those cold climates you're talking about I can plant dill in May and harvest the same plants (bolted of course) through until august, where I can plant more and get a new crop of leaves in September.

Garlic should be easy. it's finished before anything else apart maybe from the dill is done, so just use some from the cupboard, and onions, well if you just want some for flavouring, they don't need to be dried and ready for storage to use. Of course if you want to pickle them then you will have to wait. Since the onions we grow as day-length sensitive there isn't any way to move when they are ready, so everything would have to match them.

Skandi, when do you harvest your garlic? Ours is harvested in the fall, as are onions. As for dill, it bolts so fast that it's set seeds and I've had to cut it down to keep the seeds from getting lost long before cucumbers are ripe. I tend to use the seeds in pickles, but it's not as good as the flowers.  

I learn so much from people on here in different climates.

Catie George wrote:

Skandi, when do you harvest your garlic? Ours is harvested in the fall, as are onions.  

Garlic I harvest at the end of June, and onions middle of August.

My solution is to plant dill and basil every 2 to 3 weeks between May and July.  I will start basil indoors for the beginning of the season and then switch to direct sow at the end of May.   Both are easy to inter plant between other plants and you can't have too much of either one.  Some of the plants I let go to seed and whatever isn't eaten fresh gets dehydrated.

I can and pickle with the green part of bunching onions.  I also use the scapes and leaves of garlic.  I keep a large bed of bunching onions and I am expanding my walking onions bed for this purpose.  They are available over a long season and easy to use.

Cucumbers can also be planted in succession.  I do this because I still have problems with powdery mildew.  With a little frost protection a pickling cucumber can be carried into early fall when the bulb onions are ready.  Planting Dill in July will also help.  

If you are comfortable using a hybrid onion seed you can find some varieties that are shorter in season.  Maybe grow just enough of those for canning.  

I grow garlic every year and it keeps until the next year.  I store it on crates in my unheated basement

Cucumbers come in at the end of August.  That's when I make pickles

I don't bother growing dill.  There is a community garden nearby - someone is always growing dill and can never use it all.  Just ask and they're more than willing to give it away or trade for something I have.  

The goal of gardening is not 100% self-sufficiency for me.  I'm very happy growing 2/3 of the ingredients for pickles

I grow Boston Pickling cukes and they produce over a long period, like 2-3 months so I make pickles 2-3 a summer with a somewhat flexible recipe to use whatever else I have to throw in.  I've never had much success with other cuke varieties so I don't know whether that range is unusual or not. They grow in a shady area of the garden and I've been saving seed for a few years so maybe that has something to do with how they grow/produce.  Like some others, I will use whatever part of the dill the plant can spare- stalk, ferns, flowers, seed head...

My pickles are made with whatever is on hand the day the jars are filled.

Dill is always optional in my pickles. It would be easy enough to dehydrate for later use if I really had to have dill.