09/24/2026
There were SO many things happening at Pickle Fest. The food, the music, the Big DILL competition, the mechanical pickle, all the general pickle ridiculousnessā¦ but I think my favorite part of the entire day might have been The Pickle Lab.
The Pickle Lab was run entirely by volunteers as an outreach project of The Rooted Hands Project, our agricultural education nonprofit. And throughout the day, it became this amazing little landing zone for hundreds of families.
We talked about why people have pickled food for generations, the different ways foods can be pickled and preserved, and how the same basic ingredients can create completely different flavors.
And then everyone got to actually DO IT.
More than 300 families made their own jar of refrigerator pickles, choosing their flavors, building their jar themselves, and taking it home to enjoy. That is exactly the kind of hands-on agricultural education we want Rooted Hands to be about. Learn something, get your hands in it, have some fun, and hopefully take a little piece of that knowledge home with you.
A HUGE thank you to our incredible volunteers, affectionately known for the day as Dr. Dill, Dr. Gherkin and Dr. Pickle, who kept that booth going all day long and made learning about pickling genuinely fun.
And thank you to everyone who stopped by, asked questions, made pickles, and especially those who chose to donate to The Rooted Hands Project. Those donations help us keep creating projects like this.
This is the heart of why we do what we do. I hope everyone who came through The Pickle Lab walked away knowing something they didnāt know when they arrived. And hopefully with a pretty darn good jar of pickles, too. šš„
