Farming Foibles

Fellow Mid-westerners would probably label me crazy for repeatedly gushing about this summer's weather. After last year's whine fest on this blog about how crummy the weather was I have decided to be grateful for what we are getting this summer, especially since it involves a lot of sunshine and warmth! In a nod to my fellow prairie dwellers I will acknowledge that the warmth could better be described as 'stifling hot' but seeing as it is summer.....

Anyhow, waaaaaay back in the spring I mentioned how we had decided to give this gardening thing another try. We put in carrots, peas, radishes, peppers, onions, cabbage, tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers. While I am sort of tending the zucchini plants and a few tomato plants in my backyard the rest of the 'farm' in in Auntie Peggy's "back 40". Let's be brutally honest here....we has become Auntie Peggy!

She recorded the first harvest...even though she won't put a single one in her mouth!

The pea plants did not take a cotton to our amateur efforts but a serving or two have been harvested to date.

A nice fat 15 inch[ish] zucchini missed making a blog appearance because I [as usual] didn't think to snap it's picture before shredding it to smithereens and making it into several loaves of zucchini bread.

Now, given our 'zone', one would just maybe...under the most ideal of conditions...be expecting the tomato, pepper, and cucumber plants to be thinking of offering up their first fruits......

but we've had such a hot and wet summer that we have been enjoying those guys for more than a week now!!! Not so many that there's any need to read up on canning but a really nice amount. Besides the zucchini bread we've used the peppers in salads and sloppy joe's, the tomatoes in salads, and [in this house anyhow] the cucumbers have become the daily afternoon snack.

This afternoon I got a call from Auntie Peggy asking how the girls were enjoying their new organic snack. When I responded that they were a real treat and that I was even running low on Ranch dressing because of them her response was "Good keep it that way!" Normally this would have been a jab at my indulgent pantry stocking tendencies but......

when she e-mailed this picture to me I got the light!!!!! This is sooooooo a problem because we are NOT pickle eaters. Gotta go.....time to google cucumber recipes!