I struggled all morning with a corporate illustration assignment that simply wouldn’t come together, then gave up and did some therapeutic baking. Ahhhh. Six dozen chocolate chip oatmeal pecan cookies later, I feel much better.

This is the time of year when tomatoes crowd the windowsills and spill over onto other available horizontal surfaces, get sent home with friends and relatives, and find their way into everything we cook. We grow Homesteads for slicing and romas for cooking — we also use the meaty, low-moisture romas to make enough truck-dried tomatoes to last through the winter.

This weekend, The Perfect Man harvested all the garlic that we grew in the winter garden and now it’s dangling in a pungent row on the cottage porch, drying out. The potatoes have all been dug, washed and stored. We’re steadily picking Japanese eggplant and Cubanelle peppers, and if green beans were money we’d be Bill Gates.

He also whipped up a batch of Green Tomato Chow Chow, using a new recipe. We haven’t tasted it yet — we won’t open a jar until the requisite two weeks have passed — but it smelled so wonderful in preparation that here’s a link to the recipe anyway. (Instead of the jalapenos, which we don’t have in the garden this season, we substituted a cup of tangy Cubanelles.) Mmmm.

Frog choruses are holding raucous, all-night concerts in the water garden. They are amazingly loud. Lying in bed, you can hear them clearly despite closed windows and air conditioners. (Researchers at the University of California have discovered that frogs accomplish most of their impressive amplification by resonating their croaks not through their mouths, but through their ears. I liked the fact that they determined this by fitting the test frogs with tiny foam earmuffs. I’m not making this up.)

Back to work…