I have just spent some quality time helping my zucchini plants have sex.  The equivalent would be explaining sex in alarming detail to a virgin 30 year old I would imagine.  It's not exactly something you ever imagine yourself having to do but then you find one day that you are crouching around your zucchini plants with a tiny paintbrush in hand.  Digging in to flowers here and there and then brushing gently on others.  Quality time.  I damn well better get some zucchini for my efforts.  Kinda like begging your kids to produce grand's for you...
I spent the past week immersed in a choral and vocal pedagogy symposium (yeah... it's meant to sound impressive and intimidating) at the University of Toronto.  A week of remembering that I'm both a musician and a singer.  A week of reaffirming my love for what I do.  A week of sight reading and learning to conduct a choral group without looking like a complete dork.  A university campus is a strange place.  It's like this parallel universe that exists in a place (usually but not always in a city centre)  but is a whole living, breathing entity all on it's own.  Anything could happen out there in the city-world and you might never find out... or it might take a long time to find out.  And you would be ok with that because you were sitting under a tree on campus having a leisurely but intense discussion with someone about something very important that you can't quite recall at the moment.  Strange, Sacred Places.
Back in the world of Toronto the heat was overwhelming and my poor garden has been growing in spite of itself.  I haven't been watering as much as I should and I've decided that if I'm to continue with this whole garden idea then I'd better get my act together and get some manure happening in there.  Gardens need crap.  The tomatoes are intensely unhappy that the sun is still shining and the rain is playing very hard to get.  So the tomatoes have sulked off and gone to sleep.


The Chard and Kale are doing as well as can be expected in the heat.  In fact, given the heat and the lack of rain they have surprised me with their vigour.


My first, very first, haul of green beans have just come in and with them a picked a few strawberries and two... count 'em 2... raspberries.  This is today's haul.  And I'm proud of it.


This is a potato flower.  I'm chomping at the bit to dig into my potato barrel and see just what's going on under the ground.  I keep wondering whether if I dig them up can I just put the soil back and the potatoes won't figure out the difference.  That would be crazy though.  I need to be patient a little longer.  Apparently the flowers are supposed to die off and the plant itself just a little.  Patience, at least when it comes to waiting for new potatoes, is just not one of my virtues.


I finally have some cucumber flowers and please don't get on my about how late they are.  I know.  But there they are.


I just took this picture because I'm keeping this oregano stuff around mostly because the flowers are such powerful bee attractors.

I do promise recipes soon.  I have a fridge full of things to do.  I finally got to the market and loaded up on some cherries for example.  It's just so damn hot that I haven't had the heart to do any further heating up of any kind.