When summer approaches, some diet, hoping to get their bodies swimsuit-ready. Me? I'm getting my stomach prepared for summer food.

Winter might offer soup, casseroles and chili, but it can't hold a candle to summer's riot of tastes.

From appetizers to dessert, summer's got it all. There are drinks — iced tea, sweetened or black, and cold beer after a sweaty day of work. There are popsicles eaten on porches and cheeseburgers, swollen and juicy, served on paper plates laden with potato salad.

Second only to Thanksgiving and Christmas, there's no other season when food is so much at the forefront of all we do.

In any case, you can make pumpkin pie any day of the week, any week of the year, but there's only a brief, luxurious window where you can get a perfect, deep-pink watermelon.

Every summer, I try to grow food. In the past, I've mostly limited my efforts to herbs like basil and oregano. The only thing I've successfully been able to coax back year after year has been my chives. This year, mysteriously, chamomile has started popping up across our lawn like a weed.

I'm too much of a city slicker to confidently eat wild food, but just the smell is enough to transport me, back in time and thousands of miles away, to my childhood in Greece, where chamomile and fennel lined the sides of the dusty streets.

A couple of days ago, I took my younger son to the gardening shop to look for plants for a food garden.

A mother bunny has built a burrow in our backyard and though she seems to be poaching our greenery for her babies, they're too cute to resent. Instead, I suggested we buy plants the rabbits wouldn't like.

We picked out mild banana peppers and a hot Hungarian wax pepper plant. They joined a cucumber sprout my older son had been tending, and a few seeds he'd collected and nurtured inside. What we were really trying to grow, though, was memories.

Many of my own best childhood memories revolve around summer food. I think of summers past and remember ripe apricots, plucked from the trees in my grandparents' orchard, and tomatoes, blood-red and juicy, drowned in olive oil and dusted with salt.

I remember using paring knives to wedge limpets off rocks at the ocean's edge, squeezing lemon juice on top and eating them raw. There was octopus caught fresh from the sea, my grandfather slinging it against the concrete walls of our beach shack to soften it for roasting.

I remember the smell of fire-grilled meat at dusk, pork souvlaki cooked at tavernas in the village center. Our parents would let us stay up late, playing in the street, until the food was ready, and we ate it in groups, our families and friends around us in a summer feast.

Different parts of the country have their own specific summer foods — especially fruits and vegetables we wait all year to enjoy. Here in the Midwest, we have fat Michigan blueberries, Door County cherries and corn so sweet you don't even have to cook it.

I imagine where you live, there are your own summer treats, but there are some experiences most of us share.

I hope you've heard the trill of an ice cream truck, dropped whatever toy you were holding and stopped whatever game you were playing to chase the sound, so specifically summery and so joyous.

There's no culinary joy like the joy of summer eating.

And this year, I hope you enjoy every delight summer's plate has to offer. I plan to.

In fact, if you'll excuse me, my stomach's grumbling right now. I think I'll go make myself a snack.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: NataliSamorod at Pixabay