Nonny’s Zucchini Recipe

All the blueberries have been picked and eaten, and berry season is over for the summer in my yard. The vegetable garden is producing abundantly now, and it’s time for zucchini! They grow fast, and they’re sneaky. I check my giant, bushy zucchini plants every day, and pick the squash while they are small and manageable, but somehow, one, two or more always get past me, and I find ten pound vegetables hiding under the enormous leaves.

That’s OK. I know what to make with those beasts. Zucchini lasagna, stuffed zucchini, or best of all, my husband’s zucchini recipe.

Blueberry Ice Cream with Lemon, Basil and Kefir

My blueberry bush is so heavy with berries this year that the branches are weighed down to the grass and breaking. I know I need to prune it, have needed to for years now. The lazy, messy gardener strikes again. I’ve been too busy to pick many berries and lighten the load on the branches, and my husband stands at the window every day, watching birds flock to the bush, worrying that none will be left for us. He doesn’t pick them either.

Butternut Squash Harvest

These are the butternut squash I harvested from one small four dollar plant. I planted it hopefully in May in front of a trellis as tall as me made from sticks I found under the maple trees behind my house.

Mulberry Bliss

Round and round the mulberry tree

The monkey chased the weasel

The monkey thought ’twas all in fun

‘Till POP! goes the weasel.

We sang that song in my family as a child, but I never laid eyes on a mulberry tree until I lived in the house I live in now.  I wanted to plant one  when we moved here because I knew they were a bird magnet, especially the beautiful orange Baltimore oriole. I didn’t know that I already had one until my mother visited in June two years after we’d moved in and exclaimed enviously,

“You have a mulberry tree!”

Ground Hogs in the Garden. Oh Joy.

The ground hog had babies again. She lives under the handicap ramp that extends from my front porch, and she eats things. The babies are adorable.  Sometimes they play like kittens, but usually they just eat. And eat. And eat. They are less shy than she is, so I managed to take the picture above.

Strawberry Season

My strawberries are ripe. I pick a bowl full to eat or add to a breakfast smoothie every morning.

How I became a lazy, messy, gardener with a wild and weedy garden and the books that showed me it was a good thing.

I was happy to become a homeowner. Finally, after years of apartment gardens fitted into the nooks and crannies of someone else’s property, after the heartbreak of leaving them behind again and again,