Hello good garden folk! Joy and peace to you. I hope you are all doing well! Since the garden is producing at full force, this week we add our Thursday workday from 5-7. This means that through the rest of the summer, you’ll have not one, not two, but THREE opportunities to work in the garden each week! Could life get any better?

Yesterday was my first time in the garden in about 10 days and my, how things have grown! We harvested potatoes, green beans, field peas, carrots, onions, peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, carrots and some sweet-as-candy cherry tomatoes! We’ve had some very sizeable donations to Western Wake Crisis Ministry, with last night’s donation alone topping 88 pounds!

Since it’s a holiday weekend, I know many of you may be traveling. If you’re in town (as I am), I hope you’ll be able to drop by either Thursday evening or Saturday morning, or both. There’s plenty of work to do with harvest, prepping beds for second plantings of some crops, watering and weeding. We also have a need for someone to mow inside the fence and also to bring weedwhackers to neaten things up. These are tasks that do not necessarily have to be done on workdays; if you would be interested in helping with some of this “heavy lifting”, please let me know!

Hopefully you saw Anne’s email Sunday with the delicious sounding recipe for chocolate zucchini bread; if you missed it, let me know and I’ll re-send to you. My tip this week relates to zucchini. If you’ve been at the garden lately, you’ll know that some of the zucchini is massive. Some people compare them to baseball bats. While they’re not that long, some are definitely a larger diameter than a typical baseball bat. And to be honest, once it gets that big, it’s really not so good to just cook and eat. Seeds are sometimes too big and the flesh gets a little tough. Given how fast it grows, it’s really important for us to pick the zucchini pretty close on workdays. That’s my tip #1. Second tip is that the baseball-sized zucchini are still very usable. What I do is split the zucchini lengthwise and run a spoon down the middle to remove the really big seeds. Then grate the remaining zucchini to use in whatever recipe (like the chocolate zucchini bread) that uses grated zucchini; I also use it in a quiche or make fritters out of it. The tougher texture is much less noticeable when grated and you won’t notice the difference at all in the bread. And now tip #3: freeze it! Typically if you freeze summer squash, it gets mushy in the freezer and doesn’t work so well to eat as fresh squash. But if you’re going to bake it, the mushy-ness doesn’t matter in the least. I grate it and store 1 cup measures in sandwich size Ziploc bags so I can pull out whatever I need for my recipe. If you do this, don’t drain the liquid out when you thaw it; include it as-is in your favorite recipe.

Sorry to have rambled so long, but hope some of this information was useful to you. Hope to see you at the garden soon. If you are traveling, safe journeys to you all!

Sandra