While the family's away...

June has come and (almost) gone in a blur of activity. We were on vacation for a week, during which the strong sun and rain caused everything to shoot up out of the ground. My jaw dropped when we pulled into the driveway in the middle of the night and the headlights illuminated our quickly-growing squash plants. "They're HUGE!" It's fun to watch the yellow blossoms (which are tempting not to pick and eat, for anyone who's ever been lucky enough to have had them stuffed with ricotta cheese and basil, battered and fried) turn gradually into tiny pale fruits. We ended up with five plants; I'm not sure how many are pattypan and how many are zucchini, since a few were late-blooming seedlings that I had given up on and thrown away the labeled stakes.

The pepper plants are happy; there is one tiny red one and a bevy of tiny green ones waiting to ripen into red. I also mishandled the labeling of these, and since I purchased them from a couple of different places as well as starting some of my own, we really will have to be surprised when they're ready to harvest!

The greens are growing like gangbusters. I finally thinned the lettuce plants after taking this picture; it was less painful than I'd thought it would be, especially since the thinnings went straight into the colander to be washed and turned into dinner. The spinach is starting to bolt, which I know means I should harvest and freeze the whole crop before it turns bitter. I intend to do that within the next day or so, before we leave again for a week. Does anybody know whether I can plant more spinach, now? I might try it, since I have the seeds and the space.

A few nights ago when our cat Maia was curled up on my lap, I smelled something odd on her, and it took me a few minutes to place it. Finally I realized she'd been lying between the tomato plants for most of the afternoon while Rob and I planted a new bed. Hopefully, the squirrels took note!

Putting off summer

Those of us in warmer parts of the U.S. are starting to see our basil plants flower, and experience if not book-learnin' will tell you that any plant you eat the leaves of (there's a name for that, I'm sure) gets bitter if you let it go to seed. We gave up our salad mix to the weeds weeks ago; despite our best intentions, the weeding just stopped being worth the effort. The half-dozen basil plants we put into our new bed (ultimately they all ended up in the ground) are lush and full.

We've stripped or broken off the flowering heads of our basil plants for years as we struggle against the inevitable march of summer and squeeze a few extra weeks of fresh herbs. This year we have a new tip: To most effectively stall flowering, break off not just the flowering tip but the top six inches or so of each flowering stem. The leaves are the day's harvest, and the pruning will encourage new leafy growth before the urge to flower resurges.

Try as we might, though, summer wins in the end. We'll make a huge batch of pesto this month and enjoy it through the summer months.

Time to eat

Thanks to the warm front porch and some shy bunnies, the harvest has begun around here. We made a salad the other day with the porch lettuce and the winter survivor arugula.We had to cheat a bit and throw in some store lettuce, but it was still divine.

Kansas is a very difficult place to grow greens in the summer for some reason. It's no hotter than Utah and no moister than Connecticut, both places where I had decent luck with summer greens. There must be something about our particular mix of brutal heat and frequent hot winds in summer that just sucks the life out of even the most robust greens. If anyone has advice on overcoming that problem, I'd be happy to hear it.