Zucchini Bread

Yowza! What to do with all the zucchini my garden produced this year!

Zucchini is one of the easiest vegetables to grow and as such, it's known far and wide among home gardeners for overwhelming crops. 

When cooking, zucchini is treated as a vegetable and is usually cooked and served as a savory or side dish. 
Botanically, however, zucchini is really a fruit.

Not only is the zucchini versatile to cook with, but it’s also loaded with nutrients and vitamins that can help prevent cancer and heart disease. 

Building a Pumpkin Arbor

Pumpkin Arbor (July 2010)

My side garden before trellis was finished

I love pumpkins. They are just a beautiful fruit, can be used in many ways and are edible. The bright orange color of pumpkin is a dead giveaway that pumpkin is loaded with an important antioxidant, beta-carotene.

Native Americans dried strips of pumpkin and wove them into mats. They also roasted long strips of pumpkin on the open fire and ate them.

The origin of pumpkin pie occurred when the colonists sliced off the pumpkin top, removed the seeds, and filled the insides with milk, spices and honey. The pumpkin was then baked in hot ashes.

Pumpkins are cucurbits, the fruit of a herbaceous annual plant of the gourd family that thrives in hot, dry conditions and includes squash, melons, watermelons and cucumbers.

This year I decided to construct an arbor for
pumpkins and gourd vines to climb over.  (Photo above right is before arbor was finished)

I first saw an arbor similar to the one I had in mind while visiting a farm market outside Chillicothe, Ohio last fall.