The garden continues to grow well. In fact, this photo is about a week old and now you really can’t easily walk between the tomatoes and the cucumbers or the cucumbers and the squash. Trellising cucumbers has its advantages, but it’s a lot of work to set up a trellis system and then keep training the plants up constantly, so the decision was made this year to let the cucumbers sprawl as Gary’s dad used to do. The pumpkins are also creeping into other rows in the back. I’d thought to train them into the back 40 there behind the garden, but they have a mind of their own and will not be trained.
We harvest daily and are getting crazy amounts of squash and cucumbers but nothing else so far. I did see one reddening tomato today and an eggplant that’s ready to stuff. I expect to pick that first garden-ripened tomato some time next week, making this a late year for tomatoes. But once they get going, watch out!
Here’s what I’m doing with the excess zucchini and cucumbers:
Cream of zucchini soup, hold the cream. This soup has only 4 ingredients: one onion briefly sautèed in olive oil, gobs of cubed zucchini, and salt. I throw all that in my largest stock pot and cook it down until the zucchini falls apart. Then after it cools for a bit, I purèe it with the immersion blender I borrowed from Laura and freeze it in my Souper Cube Trays before I vacuum pack it:
Come December I’ll be glad of these little reminders of summer deliciousness! For Gary, I’ve made traditional bread and butter pickles:
I personally am a dill pickle fan and I don’t know how to make those. But this recipe calls for 10 pounds of cucumbers and that pretty much cleared out the excess cucumbers from this week, so HOORAY! Maybe I will make one more batch this year. We’ve planted a second row of cucumbers so we’ll be in cucumber heaven until the end of September if no gophers hear about it. Mum’s the word.