Berry Guilty

It hasn't been a very bloggy summer around here, has it?

It feels like the days just keep tumbling over each other until: POOF - three weeks gone by with nary a blog post in sight. It hasn't been a particularly interesting summer, just a fast one. Run, work, make supper, do laundry, rinse and repeat - that's pretty much what's eaten up summer 2013.

After a couple months of just sittin' there looking pretty, the garden's suddenly kicked it up into full on harvest mode. We've been enjoying green beans, cabbage, zucchini, kohlrabi, cherry tomatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, cucumbers, and this morning I even picked a little fairy eggplant. The beauty below was transformed into an especially good batch of gumbo. There was actually a large bruise on the side of the pepper not facing the camera. (I'm sneaky like that.) We've been dealing with a fair amount of blossom bottom rot this year, despite a couple applications of garden lime. I'm blaming the cool, rainy summer for all of the garden's little problems and hiccups this year, but a less attentive gardener (who me?) may be the real root cause.

Someone asked me how many blueberries I'd picked this year and I had to gulp down my pride and admit, "Just 12 cups." (And of those 12 cups, half were picked by my friend Andrew who kindly contributed his haul to "the cause.") As someone who's picked between 5-6 gallons of berries each summer for the last three summers, I may have picked myself out. (And honestly, I could not eat a blueberry for a couple years and probably be just fine.) I'm try to go easy on the self-imposed guilt trip about not picking berries (especially since there's still a gallon of berries from last year in the freezer) and enjoy a summer mostly off. My apologies to anyone *cough, Mom, cough* who had hoped to barter berries with me.

In other news, Andy went on his first canoe trip since 2009 at the end of July. He and his friend Andrew headed up to the Quetico Provincal Park for a rather cold and rainy week in the wilderness. That said, I think they were both so happy to be paddling that they didn't give a fig about whether it rained or shone. As you can see from the photos below, the sun did come out for the last half of their trip.

While Andy was off taking these scenic shots, I was at home, tending the salt mine, picking it up hitchhikers, dealing with both forgotten property and people at work (yes, a group forgot one of their people, oy), helping get people pulled out of ditch, following up on reports of hikers or canoeists possible in distress. You know, just typical life in the summer in the woods. To cap things off, when Andy and Andrew paddled up to the dock a day early, I fell through the one rotten board on the dock when I picked up their food pack. The result was just some really graphic bruising (that has just now gone away) but no actual injury. Then, not three full hours after Andy and Andrew returned home, Andy's fire department pager went off, starting a 10 day search and rescue effort that pretty much consumed the entire community, used the resources of three counties, and involved over 200 volunteers.

Verdict: Andy should probably never go on vacation again. It has been madness, MADNESS, I tell you what.
Now that the garden is starting to come in, I'm ready to settle into the routine of canning, pickling, blanching, and freezing. More on that very soon, I promise. :)