Lately we’ve been bringing in- zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, green beans, kale, chard, eggs, raspberries, and blackberries. How many zucchini and cucumber pictures am I going to show you this year? Quite a few, apparently. (I hope you don’t mind.) The cucumbers and zucchini are still rolling in strong, with some bush beans and runner beans making their way into each harvesting container. (See those holes in our green beans? For the first time I’ve found some green beans this year like that, some sort of bug eating them. Luckily, so few have been affected, but we’ve all been curious about who the culprit is. Any ideas?) We’re constantly harvesting greens, kale to make more kale chips, and chard to go in frittatas. Our harvesting rhythm lately is to harvest every other day, the rest of the time trying to catch up on preserving the previous harvest.

The cucumbers are being made into pickles by Jeff, eaten fresh, and the too-large-for-pickles ones being sliced up and put in apple cider vinegar & water in the fridge (which we eat with nearly every meal.) We still had many cucumbers left over and last week Jeff had an inspiration to make us a cold cucumber soup. Years ago I had a cold gazpacho soup and it was terrible, I didn’t have any excitement about cold soup ever since that. But I’m glad I was open minded to Jeff’s culinary inspiration because he blended cucumbers with some coconut milk, wild Alaskan salmon, and garden herbs, and it was simply out of this world. We ran out of it way too fast and wanted more.

We’re sauteing zucchini with most of our meals, have been preserving it, and still have had some to share. We sliced some in rounds, blanched it, and froze it, which I mentioned here last time I was chatting about zucchini. One of you said you shred yours and freeze it, which seemed like a great idea to me. The shredder attachment on our food processor went missing, so I ended up grating all the zucchini by hand, which I hadn’t planned on. My arm got pretty sore by the end, and I wondered if I was crazy for doing it a few times, but it went faster than I’d expected. We steamed it to blanch it and now I have a bunch of shredded, frozen zucchini for baking zucchini bread and muffins throughout the winter.

As a side note, I haven’t been digging our yellow summer squash this year. We have to pick it really tiny or else it gets too seedy and many of the small ones I’ve harvested were already too seedy. We haven’t been getting enough squash to justify the space it takes up. I’ve been preferring the yellow zucchini instead and would rather just plant that next year. I’m writing this down here to help me remember.

We didn’t grow any basil this year, but we bought some from a nearby farm and I made some pesto. I made some with pumpkin seeds and some with sunflower seeds, and we liked both. Our food processor wasn’t blending it up enough and there were large chunks of basil leaves and seeds, making it a strange consistency. I tried our Vita-mix to see if it would do the trick and it broke! So we ended up with chunky pesto. Jeff decided he loved it and wants me to make it chunky from now on. I’d prefer a creamier consistency I think, but the flavor is delicious so we’re still enjoying it and I’ve got jars of it frozen in the freezer. We want to preserve food for the winter and aren’t always able to purchase large amounts of produce from local farms all at once to be able to do that, so at least we can be preserving our extra garden harvests and get some pesto in the freezer! Every little bit we can preserve is satisfying.

Just last week we started getting another round of raspberries for the year and I can’t tell you how happy that makes us all. Bracken brought in a handful of raspberries the first day, along with his basket of blackberries. We’re still just getting handfuls of raspberries (Jeff took a picture of the handful I had yesterday) and I’m not sure if our fall crop will be quite as abundant as our spring one was, but the blackberries keep coming in by the basket so we can still have plenty of berries to enjoy!

What are you bringing in right now? Preserving? I always learn so much from your sweet comments, thanks for all you share.