Yesterday's haul

My cornucopia

I used my bicycle basket to gather all the veggies. It's pretty deep. Although you don't see all the string beans here, I collected a full pound of 'em, plus cucumbers that are mostly hidden from view.

I spent some time yesterday cooking a 4-pound spaghetti squash in the microwave. After it cooled, I used a fork to tease the strands of squash free from the rind and filled two quarter-sized freezer bags with it.

My freezer "larder" is becoming quite full with excess from the garden, including that spaghetti squash, tomatoes, chunks of zucchini and wineberries.

There's a nearby farm where someone I know invited me to help myself to the (organic!) peaches growing there (on a single tree). I collected a small bag of moldy, green and hard peaches last week. I dropped them on the kitchen counter and forgot about them for a week.

I checked on them yesterday and they were suddenly very ripe. Two had to be thrown away. I decided to adapt my late grandmother's recipe for apple crisp, substituting the peaches and a bag of frozen wineberries I'd collected in July.  The peach skins, partly covered with unappetizing black spots, had to be skinned, and I did find one small worm crawling up my hand as I washed them. It was a messy job, but one doesn't come across organic peaches that often.

The peach/wineberry crisp, however, turned out great and was well worth the effort. I like to add raisins and walnuts to the oatmeal mix.

Floral Scanner Art

I've been interested in trying my hand at scanner art for a long time. I've seen some beautiful "floralscapes" that are arranged and composed en masse on the top of a flatbed scanner. I picked this Queen Anne's Lace flower by my mailbox. I figured it would work well because it's fairly two-dimensional. (Daisies and asters would work well, too, I think.)

Isn't it pretty?

Here's what the same flower looks like with a black cloth draped on top of it.

The stem is not actually attached. I cut it so the flower would lay flat, and then added the stem below it.

If this is what a single flower looks like, imagine how great a small bouquet of blooms would look, carefully arranged (face-down) on the scanner glass.