Synchronized Summer Squash

It's started. Yesterday, I made sweet pickle relish, recipe straight from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving, page 52; and a big hit with everyone in the family. My mother eats it on pizza. I add it to salads, and eat it with hot dogs as merely a chaser. I've also been know to add it to sloppy Joes.

Today, though, the topic is squash. I planted a couple hills over the ten-year old box elder stump at the bottom of my garden. I like yellow squash sauteed with a bit of butter. I like them young, before seeds have formed and really tiny sliced into fresh salads. Just now, when I mentioned "tiny", the idea of dilly squash (they are a member of the cucumber family!) came to mind. How about pickling them with strips of red pepper when they are about two inches long?

Truth is, I am going to be inundated with them. Even splitting them with my sister-in-law's family and handing a couple to my mother, and maybe Andrea, the non-gardener with four children under 10, will not take up all the slack.

I need to come up with recipes that have my teenage son eating them. He is the principle eater in this household. So breaded and fried, a few in stir-fry (possibly cut in strips, blanched, and frozen) are all ideas I need to explore.

If you have a yummy recipe, let me know. Today, these summery yellow beauties will be swimming in boiling water for three minutes to blanch them on their way to my freezer.

But... there will me more to come...

The Bees Are Busy

Yellow summer squash blossoms

In the eternal quest to decide what do I want (to do with my day, with my life, and what will I do once my son flies beyond my wingspan and goes off to college in just a brief year), I walked in my garden, camera in hand.

The bees were hard at it. Their lives not focused on decisions, but simply on need. I could hear the buzzing, like flies working over roadkill, but without the stench. The bees were talking in beespeak about how delicious the pollen on the squash blossoms would be to take back to the hive. I watched them for a bit. At one point three of them were easily working in one blossom.

Everything about this hill of squash I added to my plot here in the village as an afterthought has been outsized. It is huge. Its stalks are huge, as are its leaves and blossoms.

I have planted other types of zucchinis and summer squash in my garden in the decade I have lived here and have never been loaded down with truckloads of their fruit. This might be my year.

I have anticipated having oodles of red okra, a good harvest of grapes, all the basil I need, and have been checking out different recipes for chow chow, sauerkraut, and kimchi. Not, yellow squash.

The skies are blue here and after yet another torrential rain storm late yesterday afternoon, the humidity is low, at least this morning. The vegetation is just dripping with dew.

For today, there is still weeding to be done, landscaping to work on, my son to raise. The "want" gets pushed on down the road replaced by the "need" for yet another day.

Sometimes, the simple acts of taking care of the needs develop into something much bigger, like a hive filled with golden honey, or the afterthought of planting a squash.

It seems to be working for the bees.