Ditch Pickle Foraging & How We Pickled Asparagus & Jalapenos
Asparagus is something many people only purchase from the grocery store or farmer’s market. But, in the spring if you know where to look, you can find it driving country roads growing wild and free in the ditches. Now I don’t know what it’s reach is but here in Southern Minnesota and Northern Iowa, we can find it in the ditches. Once you find a patch, be sure to remember where it was. In the early spring you won’t be able to find much to tell you where it was last year!
We even figured out a way to save our spots via Google Maps. Now, my dad and my father-in-law have their spots memorized. My father-in-law even knows which country road, how many telephone poles, and how many fence posts past that third telephone pole his patches are located. Incredible. I feel like I have no member whatsoever anymore because I’m busy. I keep working to become less busy but still my memory is terrible. Business is a work in progress. Ha – we’re two paragraphs in and I’m already rambling. Hang in there folks!
How to pick wild ditch asparagus?
When picking ditch asparagus, or as I call them ditch pickles, you want to be sure to cut the asparagus just under the ground with a knife. Do NOT snap it off. Snapping it off will not allow it to regrow. If you cut the asparagus under the ground it will regrow within a week and you’ll have a steady supply of asparagus through the spring. If you aren’t the only one picking your patch, you’ll grow very irritated by uneducated folks who simply snap it off halfway up. It’s irritating because they’re ruining the harvest for everyone using the patch this year. You can fix their mistake by cutting those snapped off stems below the ground too. I often wish I had a note pad to leave people a note teaching them how to care for these patches.
Our route yesterday offered up three grocery bags of asparagus. We dropped a few stems off to Grandma B and then brought the rest home to clean and trim. We decided on Friday night to clean and trim them to the right size to fit into the mason jars we planned to pickle them in on Saturday. Saves one big step for the pickling process.
This is a new recipe so in a couple weeks I will edit this post to update what worked or didn’t work or what will try with the next batch.
Just Beyond Parks Pickled Asparagus Recipe
- 3 Grocery Bags of Asparagus (approximately 6-7 pounds)
- 1 TBSP Dried Dill Seed
- 1.5-2 Bulbs Garlic (not cloves, but bulbs), cut each bulb in half
- 1/3 cup Pickling Salt
- 4 cups White Distilled Vinegar
- 4 cups Water – we use RO (Reverse Osmosis) water for all cooking and canning, our RO system is under our sink
- 1 TBSP Red Pepper Flakes – we used less than a tablespoon because we make our own flakes and they can be more potent that store bought flakes
- Jalapeno Slices – 3-4 slices per jar
Clean the asparagus. Boil a pot of water. Blanch (boil) asparagus for one minute and then put into an ice water bath to stop the cooking. Once cooled, set on paper towels to dry a bit. Once all the asparagus is blanched, we rinsed out the pot and used that same pot to make our brine. To make the brine put: vinegar, water, pickling salt, dill seeds, and red pepper flakes into the pot and bring to a boil. While we waited for the brine to come to a boil we got our canning pot heating up with enough water to cover the jars with 1 inch of water. For more in depth details on water bath canning and safety visit:
USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning.
While we continued to wait for the brine to heat up, we put garlic in each canning jar along with slices of jalapenos. Then we packed each one tightly with asparagus. If you don’t want spicy asparagus, you can leave out the jalapenos, but we want a little spice with our bloody marys or I prefer a red snapper to a bloody mary. Once the brine is boiling use a funnel and ladle to ladle in the boiling brine carefully into each jar. We added a ladle at a time to heat up the jars evenly and gently. Again, visit:
USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning to review how to can safely. We left ½” head space in the jars. Wipe the rims clean and put the lids and rings on. We then processed for over 10 minutes. We plan to try these out in a week but really we should wait two weeks. The reason we’re testing them in one week is because this is a new recipe for us so we want to try it but also because we plan to have another batch to pickle next weekend and we may make adjustments to this recipe.
It works best to have windows open during this process. We did a good amount of sneezing and coughing with all the red pepper flakes (I told you our homemade flakes are more potent) and jalapeno in the air! While we were pickling we decided to slice up the rest of the jalapenos and half this recipe, without the red pepper flakes and we added 3 TBLSP sugar, and make pickled jalapenos. I’ll edit and update this post once we try those too. First timers here! Exciting!!
Have you pickled asparagus or jalapenos before? Share your experience with us in the comments below! Any “secret” ingredients that you’d be willing to share to make the BEST ditch pickles? Read more of our adventures by visiting
Just Beyond Parks!
