The Great Zucchini

We're back from our nearly three week vacation to Colorado and Chicago. While we were gone, a kind neighbor watered our garden, and I told her to please help herself to anything ripe. I guess she missed a zucchini!

Our Day

We picked these this morning -- a yellow squash and two kinds of cucumbers. Malin had some sort of plan for the mint she harvested, but I'm not sure what that was. We need to teach her to make us mojitos.



In between swim lessons and picking up from summer camp, we baked bread. It's my standard recipe for white sandwich bread: 1 tablespoon yeast, 2.5 cups water, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 tablespoon salt and 7 cups flour. Usually it's a lovely golden brown, but it's a bit paler today. I always add a half stick of softened butter to the dough after about 10 minutes of kneading, but we were completely out.

It's only July 7 and we have too much squash

Whoever said to only plant one zucchini plant in a home garden was a wise person indeed. We did heed that advice and only planted one zucchini, but for whatever reason, I planted two types of yellow squash. And now we have tons of it. Karl had zucchini and yellow squash for dinner a couple times while the kids and I were gone, we had it last night and there's still plenty more in the fridge. So, even though the temperature was in the triple digits, I turned the oven on for a half hour and made muffins. The kids have declared that they like this squash cooking method the best.

Baby Sugar Baby Watermelon

Our trellised sugar baby watermelon is doing great so far. Last Sunday, the kids and I measured the longest vine -- 33 inches and one flower. Yesterday, it measured 61 inches. Kai quickly did the math -- 28 inches in a week or 4 inches a day! There are too many flowers on the vines to count and we have our first inch and half long baby watermelon.

Our squash is not doing all that great. The woman I talked to at Frager's suggested the soil might need more calcium or we might have a pollination problem. We better not have a pollination problem -- 20,000+ bees and not one of them is visiting my squash plants? What good are they?

Betting on the calcium deficiency, I added Tomato Tone this past Saturday. Hopefully that'll do it.