Pickle Overload

I think I may have gotten in over my head with my cucumber bed this year.  I planted 20 cucumber plants and they all are doing extremely well.

  I have been filling 6-8 gallon ziplocs a week for the past few weeks and I feel like I have been canning them non stop.  

This weekend alone I canned 21 more quarts of pickles.

  I have lost count of how many jars that I have made total, but I have given away at least 30 quarts and I still have somewhere in the realm of 40 quarts in my house.  Buying jars is becoming an expensive investment and I am contemplating feeding the cucumbers exclusively to the chickens for the rest of the season.  I am also running out of shelf space for all the pickles and am now resorting to storing them in their boxes in the back room.  I don't want to stack any on top of each other though, so I may need to invest in more shelves to hold all of my canned goods for the long run.

I may still give more away this holiday season so I will probably can a few more rounds before all is said and done.  I am hoping that I start getting jars back from the first round of giveaways, so I can reuse them instead of buying more jars.  I am definitely looking forward to the first frost for it will mean the end of picking and canning cucumbers for the year!  All in all this has been the best cucumber year that I have had yet, but the harvest has been exhausting!  I guess that means that I will have plenty of time to rest up this winter eating the bounty saved from summer.