It was probably the water. Try making a batch with distilled water? From my brief foray into pickle research they mentioned avoiding the use of hard water when making pickles. Though growing up with hard water and making some pretty nice pickles with mom when I was a kid I can't say that hard water always makes a bad pickle. :)

Sounds like I get to experiment when that one likely recipe, and dig around to see if I can find some others. Most of my cookbooks that have pickled recipes are all canned, which I could do, but with the amount of work I'd have to make a fairly large batch to feel productive about it. And then where would I store it all?

Sweet pickles are very, very evil. XP I made a batch of "firecracker" pickles (baby carrot pickles) and while I reduced the hot spices I didn't really think about the sugar in the recipe. They're sweet like candy. Hot carrot candy. GROSS!

hafoc doesn't like sweet pickles either so those are living in the back of the fridge. I need to pitch them out in the woods.

My ideal veggie blend will involve cauliflower and carrots, and maybe whole garlic and pearl onions. I wonder how snow peas pickle....