Small farm living isn’t known for its excitement – unless your idea of excitement is whipping up a salad with ingredients from your own garden, baby chicks hatching and new shoots shooting. My favourite picked-from-the-garden salad is the Mennonite variant we ate at home called “sse’lot” which means simply, “lettuce”, in Low German. It’s not the only ingredient in the salad but it’s the only use we had for lettuce. If we ate it any other way, we would have named the salad called “Sse’lot” something else.

I enjoy recording Mennonite quirks like this, along with Mennonite recipes and incidents on our farm involving my husband, my dog and sundry cats, cows and chickens. My name is Tina Wall. Welcome to The Pickle Hamper.‍ ‍