Last week I accepted two zucchinis from a neighbor, since we only had a few rolling in and we were eating them all up. This week is a whole other story. I snapped a few other pictures in the garden, but mostly what’s happening out there right now is a whole lotta zuchs and cukes. And what are we doing with all those cucumbers? All that zucchini? The smallest cucumbers we lacto-ferment to make pickles. (Speaking of fermenting, there’s going to be an awesome giveaway with that theme here tomorrow, so be sure to come back for that!) The cucumbers that have gotten larger than we would like for pickles, Jeff has been slicing up with onions and putting them in a mix of apple cider vinegar and water and sticking them in the fridge. (Bracken scattered flower petals in the background of my picture of those cucumbers because he thought it needed that, quite the photography assistant he is.) They are really yummy that way and we eat them with every meal. We also eat plenty of fresh cucumbers too.

Bracken and I made a batch of zucchini bread with coconut flour. I made this recipe and we all liked it. Bracken really liked helping grate the zucchini. But that zucchini bread barely put a dent in our zucchini pile. You would have laughed if you had seen our kitchen table this last week, with a giant pile of zucchini covering the surface. We’ve been sauteeing zucchini with breakfast and dinner, we all really like it, but we still weren’t eating it up fast enough. So I sliced it up and Jeff blanched it and put it in the freezer. It’s our first time storing zucchini that way and now we’ll have it for soups and for baking in the winter.

This week I steamed a bunch of kale and then Jeff made it all into kale chips. (We’re not a fan of raw kale in our house, so we steam our kale before making kale chips.) We don’t have a dehydrator at the moment, so we dry them in the oven. Jeff adds garlic and all sorts of things and I’ve been requesting for him to write down a recipe, but he says he makes them different every time. They may not look that appetizing in the photos, but I’m always amazed at how incredibly delicious they are and how fast we eat them up. Mr. underwear head really enjoys them too, as you can see (his costume he wore in the garden that day.) We can prepare kale many different ways, but our best bet for getting Bracken to eat a lot of it, is to make kale chips.

We’re bringing in green beans from the garden now. Our bush beans are earlier than our runner beans and are producing well at the moment. We’re letting all the peas in the garden go to seed and I like the way they look when they get all plump. We’re bringing in eggs every day and currently have one broody hen, but she is super sweet and gentle and lets me remove the eggs from underneath her (unlike our previous broody hen who went into attack mode and I’d ask Jeff to please get them.) Bracken found a fallen apple from underneath our tree and swore it tasted really good, though they won’t be ripe for awhile yet. He still likes picking the nasturtium flowers and the two of us picked a basket full of blackberries and put them in the freezer for smoothies. I need to get a whole lot more blackberries in our freezer this year for smoothies, though!

Oh, and that butterfly on Bracken’s hand in the last photo? He found it in his pool one evening and saved it. He made a home for it outside, with openings for it to fly away, and when he came back the next morning it was still there. He brought it inside for awhile, it hung out on his hand and he was delighted. Then we brought it outside and it was able to start flying. It was bittersweet. We were happy to see it fly and return to it’s life around the garden, but Bracken had a pretty hard time saying goodbye since he had grown so attached to it.

Since I always show garden pictures here, it appears I spend a lot of time out there and the truth is that I haven’t been out there much at all lately. Jeff has been doing all of the watering, and Bracken loves to join him some mornings while I’m making breakfast and working in the kitchen. I’m missing the garden and craving more garden time. This morning Bracken and I harvested and even in the morning, it was incredibly hot out already and we were sweating like crazy. Evenings are the best time for me to be out there, but ours have been so busy lately. It’s been so hot here the whole garden flops over in the middle of the day, and then starts to revive a bit after the intensity of the heat has passed. I’ve been wishing our favorite swimming hole wasn’t twenty minutes away!

We’ll be at the market tomorrow (it’s gonna be a hot one) with our fan, lots of water, and lots of ice. Wishing you all a great (and cool) weekend!