My funny girl and cucumber overload

After harvesting 26 cukes from the garden on Sunday and Steve pulling some on Monday, yesterday I harvested 22 more! Because my neighbors and I still have some, I ended up taking them along with about 6 pounds of spinach to the gym and pawning them off on some of the coaches and parents of Maisie's teammates. The cukes are huge, measuring in at about 16-inches long. Though Maisie loves picking the cucumbers, she's unfortunately not a fan of eating them. Eammon and I have been loving the fresh cucumbers eating them raw, in a constant supply of my new favorite meal, Super Simple Summer Shrimp Salsa Salad as well as a simple recipe from my neighbor Mary, peeled, seeded and sliced cucumber mixed with my homemade plain yogurt, salt, pepper and fresh dill. Eammon doesn't care for plain yogurt and I'm not a fan of dill but we both really love the cukes this way too.

Here's a current view of our main garden. Here's how it looked just 24 days ago. Everything is growing like crazy!! This garden contains Malabar spinach, all the tomatoes, Early Gala melons, Passport melons, Sangria watermelons, bush watermelon, Jimmy Nardello's peppers, habanero, jalapeno & Wonder Bell peppers, Black King & white eggplant, Orient Express cucumber, Apollo broccoli, Magic Lantern pumpkin, early butternut squash and yard long beans.

This is the front garden which contains passport & gala melons, Sangria watermelon, butternut squash and pumpkins. Wow has it grown since the picture 24 days ago.

We have jalapenos!

Jimmy Nardello's sweet peppers.

Passport melons.

When Tim was here the other day, his helper said to me that our watermelons were doing really well. I told him that I really hadn't seen any yet (and neither had Steve) so he took me over to show me the three that he found. This Sangria melon is already 20-inches long...How the heck did we miss it?? The other two that he pointed out are already 10-12-inches each, can't wait to taste them!

Some of our larger pumpkins are already starting to turn orange.

Silvery Fir Tree tomatoes. The other tomatoes we have planted are Early Girl, San Marzano, Italian plum and Brandywine as well as...

Jolly Elf grape tomatoes.

Look at all those tomato flowers, we're going to have thousands and thousands!!

This is one of two areas with sweet basil and this is after I harvested a huge amount.

In our unused side yard we have two large planting beds as well as four smaller beds, so Tim our gardener planted three different varieties of blackberries. In the smaller bed off to the right he planted boysenberries. In one of the other large beds he's going to be putting in raspberries and soon some rhubarb will be going into one of the smaller beds.

Tim planted a grape vine near our deck and said we should have grapes next year and the following year we will have more grapes than we know what to do with!!

Mrs. Duck is back nesting about 18-inches from our front door again this year and I think she's sitting on 13 eggs. The children are so good, not bothering her at all but they do love to go and check on her. Mrs. Duck has been making a nest outside our front door three years running, guess she likes and finds it safe there. Here she is back in 2008 and each year she has moved closer and closer to the front door.

Maisie this morning NOT eating her cereal as she was totally mesmerized by Word Girl. Lately Maisie has been going around telling everyone that she can see their epidermis. Then she covers her face and will ask if we can see the epidermis on her face, then she covers something else and asks again about that part, next she'll hide somewhere and let us know that we can't see any of her epidermis...then she laughs. I didn't realize that this would start so early, my funny girl!

I am a huge fan of So You Think You Can Dance and I can't even tell you how much I LOVE Alex, shoot I loved him last season when he auditioned. His routine last night was FANTABULOUS!! Yes I know that's not a word but oh-my-gosh was he awesome!!! Check out Alex the ballet dancer doing hip hop with Twitch.



Last night I went out for a girls dinner with Anne and it was nice to get out and spend a little time with her without the kidlets around. Anne suggested we do Tapas so we ended up at a local place Sugo which for both of us, was new. The place was packed and for a restaurant in the suburbs at 8PM on a Wednesday night, that and the wonderful aromas when we walked in, says a lot. We both loved it and would definitely go back again as everything was so delicious, full of flavor and cooked perfectly. It was also jazz night and the music was quite nice, not too loud and a perfect background, the watermelon basil martini which I took a little sip of wasn't too bad either! We decided that we need to do more girls nights out and that Sugo may be our go-to place.

Don't forget to enter my Bento book giveaway over on Maisie Eats Bento.