My brother and sister-in-law are visiting from California, a twice-per-decade event, so I'm mostly playing hooky this week.  I apologize in advance if my posts are on the light side, or if I bore you with family photos.  (For the record, the images above are not representations of my family.  I managed to take 17 pictures of silkworms and 16 pictures of plants on my first visiting day...but none of my long-lost family members.  I'll try to do better.  But silkworms are just so darn cute!)

Anyway, on to the meat of this post, which is --- cucurbits!  It's officially summer when the members of Cucurbitaceae begin to take over the world.

We ate our first cucumber on Tuesday, and many more are just about ready to be consumed.  The summer squash are also starting to bloom, albeit only male flowers at first.

Mark asked me a couple of weeks ago if we'd planted fewer cucumbers than last year, when I sent him to town with bagsful to dispose of and even the librarians got sick of the bounty.  I'm ashamed to say, I kept my planting at the same size.  If our new varieties and methods overflow our coffers with cucumbers again this year, I'll cut back, but with the wetness of the season, I'm kinda glad I'm hedging my bets by overplanting.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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