By now you may have eaten your fill of green beans as a side dish for dinner. If that is the case, you might welcome a way to put some away for another season.

I have had terrific luck with this dilly bean recipe, based on the one in “Putting Food By.” We always grow garlic and allow dill to sow itself all through our garden, so I always have quite a bit for any purpose. By now, there are handsome, full heads of green dill seeds with terrific flavor. I often pick an additional dill flower head to put in the jar, too, to boost the dill flavor.

Not all green beans are long and straight. When I have a freshly picked basket full, there are short ones, long ones and curled ones. The short and straight go into pint jars, and the longer ones go into quart jars. These I think of as pickles for the pickle dish. The curled ones I snap into 2-inch or so lengths and pack away as something to add to salads – pasta, potato, tuna, tossed.

I usually snap off the stem ends and leave the pointy end. I put the dill heads in first and the garlic, then tip the jar sideways and lay in the beans. When it seems they are packed in as tightly as they can be, I stick my finger or a chopstick in somewhere and wiggle it around to see if I can’t get one more bean in. Then I figure it is ready for the brine.

If you haven’t canned anything lately, it might be a good idea to check out some good instructions either in a manual, online, or a good all-purpose cookbook to refresh your memory about whatever your preferred method is, boiling-water baths or pressure canning.

I have noticed that after processing, these beans often are wrinkled, and for some reason unknown to me, they lose that after a little while and return to normal in the jar. So don’t be alarmed if that happens to you.

Dilly Green Beans

Yields six pints

3 3/4 cups water

2 1/4 cups vinegar

6 tablespoons pickling salt

6 cloves garlic

6 heads fresh dill seed or 12 tablespoons dried seeds

6 pints green beans

Snap off the stem ends of the beans and size them for the jars. Set up your canner and begin heating the water. Sterilize your jars, then put the dill heads or two tablespoons of seeds, garlic and beans in them. Bring the brine to a boil, and ladle some into each jar, leaving 1/2-inch head room. Put a lid and ring on the jar, and lower into the canner. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes or according to instructions for your canner. Remove and allow to cool.