If there weren't pickles in the canner, I would be very inclined towards bed rather than blogging. But, as it is, the canner is just about to boil so I've got a few minutes to do what will probably be a rather shoddy job of getting this blog up to date. Frankly, I'm not even sure where to start. Since I last posted, it has been a whirlwind of social gatherings, visits from out of town friends and family, the never ending cycle of harvesting and processing food that defines this time of year, a few canning projects, my first experience of acupuncture, the worst bug I've been slammed with in years, a date night with Jason where we went to two movies at Court Square Theater (we started with the compelling and angering documentary Fed Up and ended with a feel good romantic comedy Words and Pictures), and finally a trip to PA and back. Life has not been dull! Is it ever? 
On the garden front, we are enjoying our first pole beans, cucumbers and tomatoes. We are enjoying the last of our sugar snap and snow peas and the wineberries and black raspberries are also winding down. We continue to be surprised by the lovely kale we are enjoying (we've never been successful at spring kale). I pull an occasional beet for Alida (who downs as many as I cook up for her). There are herbs in abundance, mustard greens, lots of squash, onions and garlic. We dug all our garlic recently and are happy to report that there will be no ping pong playing for some time now because the table is full and overflowing with garlic! I'm using it by the bulb not by the clove and we are loving it! We had a major garden scare when we got back from our weekend in PA. Our fence charger had stopped working and we had purchased a new one but in the rush to get ready for our trip we had not gotten it charged and installed. A deer got in our garden for the first time ever and possibly also a groundhog. YIKES!!! Jason was vigilant with liquid fence for the few days that it took to get the charger up and running and as of last evening the fence was once again giving a good shock to any creature (including Jason) that dared touch it. And, yes, we did bait it with peanut butter to attract the critters to the garden fence for a little lesson about how they would be happier elsewhere. So for now it seems the beans are safe, if we can keep up with the bean beetles!
I did get around to picking and making red & white currant jam. Pretty stuff!! More recently we enjoyed two evenings of wineberry picking (thanks to the generosity of the parents of some close friends) and made a large batch of wineberry jam, as well as freezing several gallons. It is a good and bad sign that our stand up freezer is jammed full and the chest freezer is not all that far behind. Good thing I don't need to freeze cucumbers! I did freeze some grated trombone squash the other day and hope to give a little more space to more of that before the season ends. The other thing we harvested the first of the other day was potatoes. They were delicious and so beautiful. When I was showing them off to my friend, she asked if I was going to take a picture for the blog. She noted that it just looked like something that would show up on the blog. Here it is!
It is often good for us to get away here and there during this time of year, because otherwise we have a really hard time slowing down. The only other things that seem to do the trick for me are getting really sick or having a baby around. Well, I got really sick and slowed to a grinding halt and then went to PA where there was a sweet baby that I couldn't hold for fear of passing my illness to her. What a bummer that was! But I enjoyed our niece from a distance and it was very special to initiate a quilt top made by Grammy Benner with cousins (thanks to Mom Myers and her sewing circle friends for knotting it)!The highlight of the weekend for our kiddos was definitely pool time. I'll end with a short video of the activity that Alida was not interested in discontinuing, even when her lips were purple!
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