From Guest Blogger Liza Bennett Gyllenhaal, who also took these photos:

We have some serious pickle aficionados in our family. My nephew Jonah is probably the most avid. Forget about ice cream and cake, the kid’s face lights up at the sight of pickles — and he reserves his sweetest smile for this sourest of tastes. I began to grow cucumbers every summer mostly to accommodate his voracious appetite. Together, we tracked down and tested any number of recipes, searching for the absolutely perfect pickle: bread and butter pickles, garlic pickles, half sour dills.

After much trial and error, we decided that the hands-down favorite and (probably not coincidentally) the fastest and easiest recipe was the one I clipped years ago for “Dill Pickles” from the food section of The New York Times. (Click here to find the recipe at the end of the charming story.)

But, like the rest of my garden in the Berkshires during this year’s unusually cool, rain-soaked summer, my cucumbers were slow to take seed and slower still to flower and bear fruit. July drizzled into August, and the cucumbers — ironically — hung from their iron cages about the size and shape of green thumbs. It wasn’t until late August that I had enough of a crop to even consider harvesting. Jonah was away at camp this year, but I was able enlist his cousins to help in the picking, prepping, and pickling.

It’s fun to pickle with kids, especially if you forgo the (cu)cumbersome — and potentially dangerous — hot bath portion of the exercise, and simply sterilize the jars by running them through the dishwasher a couple of times. Afterwards, store the homemade bounty in the refrigerator for as long as it lasts (which, I promise you, won’t be very long).

There’s something immensely satisfying about stuffing a bunch of cucumbers into big shiny jars together with fistfuls of dill, garlic and onions … filling the jars to the brim with brine and a good sprinkling of pickling spices … making them rest in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours … then waking them up from their over-night sleep and — presto chango, like a frog that’s just been kissed — having them emerge from the jar as tasty, crunchy, real live pickles!

Of course, there are many other vegetables that take to pickling: green beans, peppers, beets, carrots, and tomatoes. I recently came across a recipe for pickled shiitake mushrooms, (click here!), using a soy-and-sherry brine. These are served at Manhattan’s Momofuku Noodle Bar, one the city’s top-rated restaurants. A long way, of course, from our screened porch in the country. But when you take the first bite, that burst of intense, compressed flavor is just the same.

Liza Gyllenhaal is a novelist who divides her time between the Berkshires and New York City. Read about her new novel Local Knowledge at www.lizagyllenhaal.com.