Vegetables, Dogs, and a BOW

Those are my excuses for not posting for a whole month!  I can explain...




Vegetables -  This year I joined a Community Supported Agriculture deal at a farm near here.  The way this CSA works is that you pay a certain amount of money at the beginning of the season, and they deliver a box of vegetables each week for 12 weeks.  You are taking a little bit of a risk because what you get depends a lot on the weather and what they are able to grow.  I only bought a half-share, and despite the lousy growing season here, I have been up to my elbows in vegetables for the last six weeks.  We've had arugula, broccoli, kohlrabi, kale, garlic in various forms, several different types of lettuce, radishes, carrots, fennel, zucchini, beans, beets, potatoes, popcorn, strawberries, spinach, basil, parsley, and a bunch of things I've left out.  I joined this so I would be forced to try some different vegetables and get out of my comfort zone cooking-wise.   I have and I am, and nobody in my family has moved out.  Yet.  If I give them one more salad, they may!  Tonight we had a neat kale salad from a recipe I found here.  It was good, but I'm not sure I'm totally into kale yet.  We'll probably move on to okra or something this week anyway.

Dogs - I've been spending a lot of time with Holly.  We finished our obedience class and are now enrolled in a beginning flyball class.  We're having fun with it, and she's the star of the class in my biased opinion.  Of course, her classmates are two poodles who won't fetch, and another dog who has yet to come to class.  If you don't know what flyball is, Youtube has some good videos.  My goal is for us to be like the ones in the Crufts championships LOL.  It's good exercise for her and she seems to have fun with it.  We've been walking three times a day, too, so we're both getting a lot of exercise.




BOW - My other time-consuming summer activity is the Block of the Week from Primitive Gatherings.  I love it this year, and I'm keeping up...pretty well.  The first six blocks are done, block seven will be done this weekend, and block eight just arrived today.  Sitting on the deck and working on these blocks is a big part of my summer, but it's been so hot I've mostly been inside with the AC on lately.  I can't wait for the weather to cool off a little bit.

I've also made some charity quilts this summer, but I'll post about those next week when we have the Big Reveal.

Hope you're all having a nice summer.  If you don't hear from me again, that means the vegetables did me in.  Is there such a thing as vegetable poisoning?