Joe's stuff.

The summer has really flown by. Amazing how fast time can pass when you are just living life. So there are several things that are worth mentioning.

1. I had a birthday. Jen invited me to a new decade by hiring a cake to be made that featured one of my favorite styles of neckwear.



BLUEBERRIES!!!









2. August came and we managed to keep up the tradition of going to pick blueberries. We happened to go a little later in the season where there were a couple of rows where we could get the late berries which are a bit smaller and sweeter.







Ian had a quart bucket to fill, and he chose the largest of the berries (easy picking!) Blake had a left and right cheek to fill, so he parked himself under the low-hanging fruit and plucked and stuffed and plucked and stuffed and plucked....etc.








Blake would occasionally crawl around the bushes to find me or look for some more easy pickings. Jen was keen on getting the smallest berries that were ripe, since she knew they would make the best jams and syrups and cooking. The big payoff was the pancakes that Jen made with the blueberries embedded whole. I should just refer to them as cakes, because they were thick and delicious. Add to that some of the blueberry jam that I made, and it was heaven.

3. I planted a garden this year and was relatively disappointed when the zucchini and cucumbers and pumpkins didn't seem to pollinate very well. I would routinely have a few female flowers and would hope that the male flowers would make themselves available to the bees. (I didn't see any birds.) However, the zucchini would just shrivel after a few days because apparently it needed a bit of help with the old pollination routine. I guess I'm not too worried about it, because most of the starts came up in the compost pile from the seeds from last year's CSA vegetables. Today, as I was out cleaning up some of the cherry tomatos that had blown off the plants due to tropical storm winds over the weekend, I thought I'd have a look for ANY fruits on the squashes. I found these two guys hanging out under some tall grass. I call them my squashcumbers. Perhaps they are overripe? Or improperly cross-pollinated?