My absolute favorite time of the year is summer time. I have so many friends that seem like they have a whole new personality when summer is approaching. Like my friends, I love getting out as soon as the weather turns warm, whether that means meeting my friends after work on a restaurant patio, or having them over for a backyard bar-b-que, or going for bike rides and hikes in the sunny weather.

I recently had someone ask me what it was about summer that I loved so much. They asked what my top three favorite things about summer time would be. Well, I couldn’t decide right away, because there are just so many things that you can do in summer that you can’t do in the winter, and I love everyone of them. I wanted to make sure that if I came up with a list of top three summer things, it would really be my favorite things.

After a week I was able come up with a top three list. My top three would be 1. cooking on my Big Green Egg BBQ, 2. spending time on my Seadoo, and 3. gardening. I tried to pick three diverse activities that in total would really capture my love of summer time. There are other things I love about summer but these are my favorite activities.

Cooking is a favorite hobby of mine, and I take every chance I can to attend any cooking class or watching cooking shows on HGTV or The Food Network. I just love the dinner and wine classes that are given at the LCBO (liquor and wine store) downtown. So I am forever looking up recipes and trying new things out. About 5 years ago my mother contributed towards a house warming gift for me, and it turned out that my partner and I got a Big Green Egg for our bar-b-que. We’ve never looked back, and I have to say that bar-b-quing with the Big Green Egg is a gourmet chef’s bbq dream! I’m not a gourmet chef yet, but with this charcoal smoker/convection oven/bbq, I can smoke, roast, bake, grill – you name it, I can cook it on the big green egg!

My next top three item is being out on the lake at our cottage on my seadoo. I’ve always loved the water growing up, and I tended to be out on the water anytime I had the chance. But now that I’ve grown up, bought my own cottage, and bought my partner and I each a seadoo, that is where I spend most of my cottage days. From the time I haul them to the cottage and take off the sea-doo covers, to the time they are packed up and taken home for storage, they are barely given a rest.

Gardens have always been a part of my life. Ever since I was little and followed my mother around with the weed pail it just seems that I enjoy gardening and the beauty my gardens provide more and more each year. I follow the perennial and wild English garden philosophy, so even though the amount of space that my gardens take up expands every year, I still spend the same amount of time every year doing the necessary weeding and pruning and re-arranging. I have gardens both at the house and the cottage, so I have no shortage of time in the garden come summer.

It took me a little while to narrow down my list of great summer time activities to just this list of my top three. There were a lot of things that I didn’t include on this list, like mountain biking through back trails, going on hiking/camping trips, driving up the coast and visiting touristy fishing villages, and one that just missed the top three by a hair, going to the drive-in. I can’t wait until next summer, when I can enjoy my seadoo, gardening and Big Green Egg for another entire season.