Recipe: Zucchini pickles

It's the age-old question: what do I do with all this zucchini? The stuff practically plants itself, and there's always one or two (or five) of the shiny green squash on the plant, ready to pick. In my family, several of us don't like the texture of cooked zucchini, so for years I've been making lots of zucchini bread (I'll post that recipe too) and trying to freeze or give away the surplus harvest.
When I discovered this recipe and decided to adapt it, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it gained enthusiastic support at our house. 3 simple ingredients and a few hours in the fridge and our zucchinis taste like an extra crispy blend between bread-and-butter pickles and sweet pickles. They are great on sandwiches or just for plain snacking if you like the tangy, sweet flavor - which I do!

Zucchini Pickles
1-3 zucchini*
1 cup water
1/3 cup white sugar
1/3 cup white vinegar
1-2 tsp salt
Slice zucchini into thin coins. Combine water, sugar, vinegar, and salt in a jar and mix well. Add zucchini and store in the fridge. Flavor will be best if you don't start eating for at least 3 hours.
*Tip: Harvest them before they get too big, about 6 inches, or the length of your hand. I used to wait until my zucchini resembled baseball bats until I realized they were more tender and had much smaller seeds if you get them young.

What to plant - April or May

I know, I know, it's August now. But I still wanted to go back and document what we planted in the spring. San Diego is great; we have a long summer growing season and also a nice sized winter growing season. So you can basically have a garden year round. Here are some pictures of our garden boxes from earlier in the summer:

Here we have blueberries (in the planter boxes), hollyhocks along the back, yellow squash, bell peppers, red onions, and 2 zucchini plants.

 This one has four tomato plants (yum!): Early Girl, San Diego, Champion and Sungold. The Sungold variety is a cherry/grape tomato that has done really well for us. If I had a bigger cage, I think it would grow ten feet tall!

 This box has cucumbers in the back, strawberries in front, and I'm trying to get some zinnias to grow in the middle but our chickens were digging around and kind of smashed them.

 This box is pole beans in the back (which did really well in the early summer), petunias in the front for some color, butternut squash, and cantaloupe. I draped the growing cantaloupe vines over an extra tomato cage and was pleased by the result: it uses less space and seems to shade the fruit better than if I let the vines just creep along the ground.

And here we have the kids' box. My boys planted a cornucopia of flowers, zucchini, radishes and onions in the front half and I have my second round of corn in the back half. Gotta love that corn!
So there you have it! My lovely crop of Summer 2018!

I guess the beginning is a good place to start

I was born on a dark stormy night...OK, that's the wrong beginning. Let's try again.
My gardening journey started in March 2009. I had an apartment, a baby son and a fair amount of free time while my husband was at work. We decided that it would be fun to have a garden. I'm not sure where the idea came from. Maybe from the sleep-deprived hallucinations of a new mom who's sleeping in 3-hour chunks. But more likely it was the fact that growing up, my family had a garden and I have good memories of that. Anyway, we rented a spot in the Magnolia Community Garden for $50 a year, water included. (Thinking about my current water bill, it kind of makes me want to rent that spot again and go live there. Water around here is expensive!) A previous gardener had already put in lovely garden beds and a fence, so all we had to provide was seeds, sweat, and a lot of naive enthusiasm!
Our first lesson in gardening: weeds grow really well in March. We neglected our plot for a couple weeks and came back ready to plant to find this lovely jungle.

 Yup, we're expert weed farmers alright. I spent quite a few hours clearing everything out. My son amused himself by playing with a measuring cup in a laundry basket. (Toys are so overrated.)

Cute little tyke isn't he? Takes after me.
After a few months of loving care, our garden looked like this:

I don't remember how well that first year of gardening went, but it must have been fun because we stuck with it for the next 5 years, until we bought a home in 2014. At last, we had our own backyard! Only problem: it looked like this: 

We had one tree, a termite-ridden old bird aviary, and a lot of mostly broken sprinkler heads scattered around the yard. But glorious day, look at all the potential! We could hardly wait to get started landscaping, and a garden was definitely going to be part of it. 

Well, I could chronicle the entire landscaping experience...but then the blog would have to be called "San Diego backyard remodeller girl" instead. Doesn't have the same ring to it. So let's fast forward past that thrilling story and get back to the garden. Here's our yard today:

We haven't figured out how to keep our grass alive yet (it could relate to my prior comment about the price of water) but my boys' pool noodle light saber makes a lovely lawn ornament, doesn't it? Our garden is definitely a work in progress - like all good things in life are - and I decided it would be fun to chronicle our experience here. The blog is meant to remind me of lessons we've learned and maybe help other SoCal gardeners who are trying to figure out how to deal with our ridiculously long growing season and challengingly bad soil. Hope you enjoy my ramblings!