Blooms and Some Splashing

Wow, has my garden grown! I went out today to check on it after the big rain last night, and I was amazed. One zucchini plant has a flower, the catnip are in full bloom, and the herbs are still alive, somehow. I wonder if I'll get more strawberries this year. I know I bought ever bearing, and I think that means I get two batches per year. I'm actually hoping for some zucchini, because I can make so many things with it. I remember a few years back I made this chocolate zucchini bread that was melt-in-your-mouth delicious.

I'm rather proud of myself for remembering to water regularly. I have the perfect excuse to skip it. You see, our back faucet is broken and won't work with the hose. So I've been using a watering can and hand watering the garden and the raspberries at least every other day for a month now. It's quite a workout.

Not only did I manage to keep the plant my friend gave me alive, it is actually thriving. The plants (I guess there are several) have doubled in size and now fill up two whole squares in the garden. The nasturiums even have these little flowers on them. They have yellow petals with little red dots. There's also a red flower on one of them, but it hasn't opened yet. I will have to taste them at some point. I wasn't brave enough to do that today. I need to look up recipes for cooking flowers and see what I can find.

Next year I think I want to grow spinach. I love fresh spinach salads, and they're best when the spinach is fresh. I'll have to research that and see what kinds of spinach are the easiest to grow.

So far I'm planning on spinach, peppers, zucchini, several kinds of squash, tomatoes, carrots, peas, strawberries, raspberries, and perhaps a pumpkin. I think I'm going to need a bigger garden. I like how easy a raised bed is to take care of, so I am thinking I'll have Greg help me make mine twice as big.

As for the raspberries, they're doing pretty well. I only have berries on the one in the center, but they definitely look like raspberries. That is a positive sign, I guess. The other plants are, well, alive. My mom was suggesting to me the other day that we take a piece of her raspberry plant and put it in the empty space between mine. She has a different variety of raspberries, and they are excellent producers. Perhaps in a few years I'd even have enough raspberries to have in one bowl of cereal.

I love the kind of Sundays where you don't go anywhere. I got the chance to take a nap on the couch, read and drink coffee on the screened-in porch, and bake in the kitchen. These are the best kinds of days. I just finished reading "Fresh," a nonfiction history/geopolitical/nutrition book by Susanne Freidberg. It's a kind of a history of how the modern way of eating came about. I think my favorite little story was of the Montreuil growers, in France. They grew the most beautiful peaches, and they even covered them with little paper bags while they were growing. Overall this book was fascinating and pretty in-depth. I'd recommend it to those of you who enjoy that sort of thing.

Greg put up Nick's swimming pool today, and Nick got to splash around in it. I think his favorite part, though, is practicing pulling up. Nicholas has been working on standing, and I think the water makes it easier. He's not that steady on his feet yet, but he's trying. It was all we could do to get him to sit down in the pool. Everytime he'd just try to grab on to the edge and pull up.

I spent a lot of time this weekend on a site called brainmass.com. It's a site where I answer questions and do basic tutoring for college students. They post a question or an essay they need help with, and they give a bid for how much they think it's worth. If the question is of interest to me, and the price is right, I answer it. Sometimes I'll pick questions that I don't exactly know the answers to, just because I want to find out the answers. Then I can research them and write something up. Is it weird that I enjoy that kind of thing? Oh well, I made $49 anyway, for about 2 hours worth of work, spread out over the weekend.