Full summer

Summer has thoroughly arrived here, and I'm amazed at the height of the tomatoes, corn, squash, and sunflowers -- a record-setting year.

I have been making meals on yellow squash; slice thin, cover with garlic blossoms or onion blossoms or both, put into a suitable bowl and zap on the popcorn setting. Serve.

Or beets: pull one beet about two to three inches in diameter, wash, slice the root thinly, spritz with water, place in bowl with onion blossoms, zap on popcorn setting. While microwave is running, separate the stems from the leaves, give the stems to the guinea pig, cut up the leaves, wait for the bell, add the leaves to the bowl, zap another minute. Serve.

Or salad: Carry scissors and colander to the garden. Cut into colander: romaine lettuce, Grand Rapids lettuce, Bibb lettuce, Bok Choi leaves and stems (if young), ditto red chard, onion greens, garlic blossoms, beet greens, nasturtium blossoms, snow peas. Bring into house, wash, drain, add diced hard-boiled eggs, serve.

The nasturtiums have come up everywhere. I let the excess ones grow to about a foot high, pull them, and use them as mulch around the apples and plums.

The bush peas I've planted appear to be looking more like climbimg peas, so I have "bushed" them with some sapling-like shoots from the flowering "willow" tree. Don't know what else to call it. It's a water-loving spcies that grows to about thirty feet, very rapidly, like a Lombardy polar, and dies out, making strong shoots all the while like those of an unpruned filbert. It makes flower heads in early spring that resemble lilac. The shoots, I have discovered, root easily when used as garden props, so I am propagating them to plant round the place as a supply of garden stakes, withes, and even firewood.

Time to move the water. Love to all,

risa b