just for Mercedes

She and Ilya are in Spain right now, so I don't even know when she'll read this, but we made gazpacho for dinner tonight! About 1/4 of the tomatoes came from my bosses' garden, about 1/2 from the store, and the rest from our garden. There's some sort of tomato thief afoot at our house that eats or knocks down our tomatoes before they're ripe enough to pick. The gazpacho also has jalapenos and parsley from our garden. It's really, really delicious.

In other garden news, I have 2 watermelons growing! They're little and cute right now, and I'm super excited for them to grow and to eat them. We also have some more eggplants coming along, and another banana pepper has finally started growing. Not as good a haul as we were hoping when we started this project, but not bad for someone who can kill a plant just by looking at it, like me.

reaping what we've sown

We've used stuff from our garden in 2 meals this week! It's been pretty awesome. This Sunday I used a bunch of basil, oregano, and parsley in this turkey and vegetable casserole thing I made, and then yesterday we made this pasta, tomato, shrimp, and basil mix. Both meals were quite delicious. It's been fun being able to use stuff already. Not much is ready to pick and use, mainly just herbs and some tomatoes, but it's still cool. I can't wait for more stuff to be ripe enough to eat. Oh, and blueberries! We've picked and eaten like a couple dozen blueberries. It's awesome.

Speaking of the garden, it's growing out of control. Like seriously, the eggplant leaves are bigger than my head. The zucchini have overpowered the strawberries, though the strawberries seem to love it. I guess they like being in the shade, it keeps them cooler. It's pretty exciting that I have yet to kill anything.

In other news, it's starting to slow down a bit at work. Finally. After next week we're done with school groups; then we just have to figure out how to get some more tourists in to keep us busy. Otherwise I'll go crazy with boredom after a couple of weeks. People keep asking me if we're going to take another trip this summer. They say they need something to read.

There's probably more going on, but honestly, I've been working on this post for about an hour and can't come up with anything else. Luckily I have this entire weekend off from work, so hopefully we'll go have some adventures and I'll have something to write about.

garden update

This is impressive. It's been a week and a half and nothing's dead in my garden yet! Things are actually surviving! Dare I say they're doing well? I dare! Check this out!

In this picture you can see a) my watermelon seeds coming up, in the far bottom right corner, b) my butternut squash seeds coming up, to the left of the watermelon, and c) a strawberry that's turning red, on the left, resting on the wooden frame. How awesome are all of these?? That zucchini's looking pretty good too, it's between the butternut squash and the strawberries.

In this picture you can see a) my corn coming up from seed, on the far left, b) my pole beans sprouting, surrounding the sticks (i.e. their poles), and c) my eggplant that has freaking doubled in size! The eggplant is on the other side of the pole beans from the corn. It's grown like crazy. Oh, and the blueberries are totally forming. Everything is actually looking really good and healthy. It's pretty exciting.

My flowers are less than impressive. I planted some moonflowers (I think that's their name) by the back porch, but nothing's really come up there yet. I guess that's ok, at least the things we plan to eat are doing well. I just planted a swamp rose that someone at work gave me last night, so we'll see how that goes.

our garden!

We had a very productive weekend last weekend: we finally, finally planted our garden! We've had a bunch of plants for about a month now, and have been moving them around to make sure they're getting sun and not too much rain and stuff like that. Plus, Home Depot had vegetable plants and seeds on sale, buy one get one free! So we loaded up, built our garden bed, and went to town.

In the picture on the left, you can see the whole backyard, freshly mowed. You can see the fire pit that we've been using for weeks to get rid of the shed. You can also see the garden on the far right of the picture, and the citrus and fig trees we planted are in there too. The picture on the right is a close up of our vegetable garden box. We have a nice big tomato plant, which already has a bunch of green tomatoes coming in! About 1/4 of the garden is tomatoes, mostly just your basic red tomato, but I also got a black tomato that I'm super excited about. There's also a few different types of peppers, some eggplant, squash, and a bunch of herbs. I planted seeds for corn, pole beans, squash, and watermelon. Watermelon! I so hope I get a real watermelon this summer. Oh, and there are a couple of blueberry plants next to the box, with actual blueberries coming in! I am so, so excited about my garden. So if you come visit this summer, you can have some fresh home-grown produce on your pizza.