Adventures in Cooking Our CSA Share: Keeping Up

I haven't blogged about our CSA share much recently, mainly because I have had absolutely nothing to do with its cooking. Gommie and Pop did an admirable job working their way through our box for 3 weeks. Pop diligently picked up the box each week, purchasing extra green beans because he enjoyed them so. He also ate his weight in large tomatoes from the farm and grape tomatoes from our Topsy-Turvy plant, which is good because neither I nor the kids like them.

And Gommie dutifully cooked everything else--boiling sweet corn, baking summer squash with onions, helping Pop with the green beans, slicing those tomatoes with salt and pepper, boiling/scrambling/frying dozens of eggs.

Gommie and Pop also helped with our own garden, picking the last summer squash before we yanked the rotting plants out of the dry soil and supervising the kids in the picking and shelling of our Dragon Eye beans, producing about a 1/4 cup. They made sure all of our surviving herbs, including basil, parsley, lemon balm, and mint, were watered and weeded, with the remnants of the pansies and petunias (petuniae?) and marigolds removed. Then Pop was on a tear. He cut down a tree, trimmed hedges, shaped boxwoods, pulled even more weeds, watered everything else. I think it reminded him of playing in the woods of his cabin . . . except cooler.

So, not a lost month by a long shot, especially since Gommie and Pop did a better job of eating through our box than we sometimes do (but then, there were 4 adults eating instead of 2!). And they got our garden ready for the winter.

I still have some time with our CSA as we enter the fall season of winter squash, root vegetables, and another round of leafy greens. I'll just have to save all my summer squash recipes. And I have ideas for improving our garden for next year (I think of it as a learning garden): herbs up front; two beds in back--one with the squash, the other with the beans. Less of the former, more of the latter; flowers only in the rock wall. Because, you see, I've had a lot of time to think about it . . . .