Last night, we had 70 mile per hour winds (according to some storm reports from our county), which delivered half of a tree onto a section of my sunflowers and zucchini.

The sunflowers, sadly, did not survive. Zucchini, on the other hand, is impossible to destroy. Puck managed to pick a bag full of it.

Of course, I didn’t take a picture of the mess in the garden before I started cleaning it up. Maybe I’ll get a shot of the branches piled up later.

Puck loves zucchini season, because we never get around to eating it all… and that means that he gets zucchini with his breakfast nearly every day!

My niece and nephew spent the night at our house last Thursday, and while they were here, we watched the Disney/Pixar movie “Ratatouille.” There was a two-year-old and a three-year-old, and Puck and two cats… And so I missed about half of the movie, but the dish has been in my mind.

Coincidentally, I picked one ripe eggplant and a half dozen little courgettes from the garden the other day. Since it was fairly warm out, I didn’t want to start up the oven… So I decided to hang out on the deck and try making a “grilled rattatoulie.”

Step 1: cut and grill zucchini, eggplants, onions, and peppers.

Step 2: layer vegetables in a disposable pie tin. Add garlic, basil, and thyme; drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle salt and pepper, and top with about 1/2 jar of tomato sauce.

Step 3: Cover with tinfoil, and grill at medium-high heat for 20 minutes.

… Serve with other items that have been wrapped in tinfoil and grilled. For example, buttery garlic bread. It was really good!

We spent much of the day out in the sun, and went for a nice bike ride. Beautiful weather this weekend, and rain possible tonight. I always hope for rain over night.

The daisies are in full bloom! I also picked our first small zucchini, one eggplant and a pepper, a head of broccoli, a bunch of chard, rosemary, sage, thyme, and basil this afternoon. Tonight for dinner, I think we’re going to try making ratatouille in mini bread loaves… on the grill, with garlic bread. Curios to see how that works!

Kallie says, “Happy 4th of July!”

Once again this year, I planted both yellow and green summer squash (zucchini): Yellow Sebring and Green Elite Zucchini. I placed a row cover over half of the young plants hoping to keep out vine borers this year. I haven’t seen evidence of the borers yet on any of the plants, but it is still early.

With any luck, we’ll be eating zucchini this weekend!

Last weekend I was getting kind of sick of our composting system (piling up compost behind the garden and blocking it off with skids so that Puck won’t eat it), and so I built this. It is made out of untreated 1×4 and 1×6 pine boards. Chris treated it with linseed oil after it was built. I picked up the boards in the standard/less than perfect pile for next to nothing at Menard’s last Saturday.

I’ve been neglecting our blog a bit because I’ve been very busy working… and also, we are planning a kitchen remodel this month! This means that during prime canning and freezing time, we won’t have a working kitchen in our house. Hmm. Not sure if that will be an issue or not.

I finally ripped out all of my zucchini plants, and planted peas where they were. Hopefully we’ll have sugar snap peas in September and October, if the frost holds off long enough!

Jessi’s half of the garden is reaching full-harvest mode!

I probably should have picked the broccoli a couple days ago – it’s just about to flower. There are some nice cauliflower heads out there that I didn’t notice last night. I have more than 20 cauliflower and broccoli plants in the garden, and they seem to be taking quite a while. I started them way back in March – you’d think they would have matured by now. It was a hot spring, though – so maybe that had something do do with it. It’s also getting a bit too hot for lettuce – Chris’s lettuce bolted already. I’ve still got a few heads out there that look like they’ll be just fine for a while.

You know it’s summer when every meal looks something like this:

I’ll have to get up early tomorrow to pick the rest; there are at least 15 more where those came from!

I should add, these were from Jessi’s half of the garden

They’re Back!

This is the adult Vine Borer Moth. She lays her eggs at the base of your summer and winter squash plants, and when the eggs hatch the disgusting maggot-like worms tunnel into the hollow stems, eventually killing the plant.

Here’s the yellow squash growing in the zucchini section. It’s quite round for a yellow crookneck squash – I wonder what it will turn out to be!