by Leslie Cox; Saturday; August 1, 2020

The zucchini harvest has officially entered the struggling-to-keep-up stage! The bigger ones that snuck up on me have been turned into a few chocolate zucchini cakes and zucchini pineapple breads…both made with Splenda to accommodate John’s diabetes diet. Zucchini lasagna has also made a frequent appearance on our menu. I am also well on the way to putting an over-abundance of grated zucchini into the freezer for the winter supply.

This week…in the interests of preventing a profound boredom in how we consume our bountiful zucchini harvest…I went on the hunt for some new recipes to tickle our taste buds. One interesting possibility was found in the Salt Spring Island Community Cookbook called “Zucchini Pizza Crust”.

Now, admittedly, we typically never make pizza ourselves. We have found a couple of brand name pizzas which we like…so a pizza dinner has become one of the go-to meals for cook’s night off or I-am-too-tired-to-cook nights. But I was willing to give this recipe a trial run anyways.

And, boy! Was I ever glad I did! John too. He raved about it so much, I made it twice this week!! Actually, a second run was totally necessary so I could tweak the recipe a little bit. Problem was…we were so anxious to dig into the pizza both times that it was completely consumed before I even got a picture of it. Guess I will have to make it again this coming week. Like John is complaining.

Personally…and not to toot my own horn…I think a part of the success of this pizza recipe trial was the tomato sauce recipe I concocted from the remaining stash of last year’s tomatoes in the freezer. It turned out to be another big hit with John so it has gone into the recipe book…along with the zucchini pizza crust one. (I seriously need to move the recipe book project onto the formatting stage…except I keep adding more recipes!!)

Out of the kitchen and into the garden when time and the heat allowed…it has been a week of collecting assorted seeds as they ripen.

Two of my passions as a gardener: seed saving and the subsequent seed sowing in spring. There really is nothing more basic than taking a small seed, placing it in the soil, nurturing its growth, harvesting its fruit and saving its new seeds for the following year’s garden. It is necessarily more important with vegetables and fruits but every bit as satisfying with seeds for the ornamental garden.

Either garden scenario, collecting seeds from your own garden means you are establishing a strain of seed which is inherently suited for the climate in your region. It cannot get much netter than that.