![Pickling Cucumbers in Maine [Interview]](https://i0.wp.com/herbaria3.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Neuchâtel_Herbarium_-_Cucumis_sativus_-_NEU000092628-e1530903151633.jpg?fit=4526%2C3477&ssl=1)
Click to hear Jim’s story
Me: Hi Dad. We’re sitting here in the backyard and I am hoping that you will tell me a story about a plant.
Dad: When I was younger my parents used to take my sisters and I up to my grandparents’ farm in Limerick, Maine. My grandmother was great for preserving foods and making pickles and so forth. So one day she asked my sister and I to walk to the nearest farm–which was about a mile, a mile and a half away–to get a bucket of pickling cucumbers. Well, we got the cucumbers and on the way back we decided we’d have one. So they were fresh right out of the garden, so one went to two, went to three. So by the time we got home, my grandmother looked at the bucket and there was only about seven cucumbers left in the bucket. And she was a little bit upset. And she said “The next time that we go up to get anything, we better come home with a full pack or we will pay the consequences.”
[My dad just added a note: His sister recently reminded him that they brought a salt shaker with them when they went to get the cucumbers!]
Me: [Laughter] How old were you?
Dad: I was about seven and my sister was 12. And that was around 1945, ’46 in that area there. So we used to spend our summers up there all the time, and we had a great time. They didn’t have a working farm but we used to go to the farm next door and I used to go haying… My job was to pack the hay down so as we brought the cart into the fields, they would throw the hay on and I was…the project was…they would see how much they could get in and get me buried in the hay while I was packing it down. So I really did, at that time, I had a very very enjoyable summer.
Me: I bet. Wow. Thanks dad that’s a great story.
Dad: You’re welcome.
Click for a recipe for pickling cucumbers, Maine style.
