How did you mark the end of winter?

I took down our Christmas cards.

To celebrate the arrival of spring, I caught you a few pictures of flowering spring trees and bushes in the nation’s capital:

And then I spent the afternoon in the garden, which I neglected to put to bed last fall. When I arrived, it looked like this, which is pretty much how I left it, but covered with leaves:

(Incidentally, if you click on that last shot and go to my Flickr page, I’ve put in notes on the picture showing what plants came back/survived the winter. We were pleasantly surprised.)

A few hours later, Rudi and I had much tidier beds and had planted shelling peas, lettuce, spinach, chard, broccoli, broccoli rabe, and onions, but I forgot to take a picture to show you the difference. Next week…

Did you realize there’s only one more Thursday in August after today? No, neither did I. Alas, it would seem that if you want to spend the rest of your summer soaking up the rays and eating barbecue, you’d better get out there this weekend…

Here are three things from my past week that struck me as beautiful:

1. Way back in the spring, Sarah and I went to a yarn festival, where we also bought some soap. Mine has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting for us to need a soap refill — a moment that finally arrived over the weekend. The scent I chose, Fluffy Pajamas, is mild and comforting and makes me extra excited to perform my daily ablutions.

2. Erin McKeown was this evening’s Millennium Stage performer. Since I would gladly pay money to see her (and have), I was delighted that I could get out of work and over to the Kennedy Center in time to catch her set. I’m even more excited to hear that she’ll be performing locally again in October. (Also, you can watch Erin, too, if you’d like in the archived version of her performance.)

3. As I was trying to get some unruly plants to stay in my garden plot rather than straying into the common paths, I looked down and found that one of my plants had grown this:

One of my plants has a baby peanut! I covered it up to keep it nice and toasty until harvest time in the fall.

ETA: I forgot one! I worked from home on Monday waiting for a perishable package that had been mis-routed to Little Rock and delayed. While portions of the experience were frustrating, I was highly impressed when the mail carrier telephoned me to say that she’d seen all the notes I’d left saying I was home but that I clearly wasn’t hearing her knocking on our outside door and could I please come sign for the box. Institutions may sometimes fail, but people come through in the end.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your life this week?

I thought I’d share some photos from Rudi’s and my community garden plot because I don’t think I’ve done that yet this season:

Rudi surveys the week’s growth.

Our chard re-seeded itself after last year and was our first crop of the season.

This is the rosemary plant our neighbors gave us to replace the one that was plant-napped earlier in the season. It seemed safer to plant it down in the garden, rather than where it would inevitably be stolen by some unscrupulous person.

This was our third season for our strawberry plants and the year they really came into their own. We got no berries the first year, a few last year, and have now harvested two bunches of strawberries and will get at least one more.

Green beans — still covered with fuzz.

Shelling peas — still more shell than pea.

We planted some seedlings — tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, kale, and cabbage. The cabbage and the kale are now huge. The farmer we bought them from said we can just harvest the outer leaves and the plants should keep us in leafy greens for a good amount of time.

The salad greens are abundant — we planted two types of lettuce, two types of spinach, and arugula.

The arugula has gone to seed (as has one variety of spinach) already because I didn’t stay on top of it.

Here’s the back of the garden — peas and kale are what’s growing in the center of the shot.

Beans and peppers and strawberries — and the neighbor’s garden in the background. They are growing a healthy crop of weeds right now, but I expect to see it cleared in a week or two. They usually tackle the planting in June.

This might appear to be a forgotten patch of earth, but instead where we planted our potatoes and our peanuts. I believe what’s popping out is all just the potatoes, but it could be peanuts because I don’t know what the plants look like. (Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out soon.)

And we aren’t the only ones enjoying our garden patch. This fellow thought our kale plants were just grand.

So that’s it right now. But I will say that it’s really cool to walk home from the garden with a whole tote bag of things you’ve grown — two containers of strawberries, a bag of spinach, a bag of lettuce and arugula, and a bag of cabbage and kale.

Sorry for disappearing on y’all, but today was Rudi’s birthday, which meant that I spent a lot of time this weekend running around and shopping and cleaning.

The good news is that it paid off and Rudi, who has just toddled off to bed in his old-agedness (Now that he’s a year older than me once more, I can start teasing him again… Clearly his tiredness has nothing to do with the 150+ miles he rode this weekend nor with the hours at which he rose to do so…), seems to have had a nice weekend filled with bike riding, friends, and food. We passed a pleasant evening at Malcolm X Park, where the fountain was running, the drum circle offered an aural backdrop, and our friends helped cap off a great day with a picnic dinner.

One of the blogs I read had a post just this morning about our not taking the time to appreciate the here and now. I just want to put it out there that this evening, surrounded by our six favorite people in D.C., was definitely one of the good old days I’ll be looking back on. I could feel a sense of well-being and happiness wash over me as we lay on the blankets and played board games. It was just … right. Emily Gibbs would be pleased.

On other fronts, the Burrow is still a mess. It’s frustrating, but it feels like we’re making progress toward achieving some balance and harmony with our surroundings again. I have to keep reminding myself that since it didn’t reach this stage overnight, it’s unreasonable to expect to rectify it that quickly. This weekend’s big steps were to put together a shelf we bought back in February (sadly, it’s true; we even schlepped it awkwardly home through the aftermath of Sno(w)verkill) and to start a box of things that should head to Goodwill.

Finally, think good thoughts for my garden, please. The weekend’s hectic schedule didn’t leave time to make it down there, so I’ll be heading over after work, rain storm or not. I hope my plants can forgive the neglect.

The days have gotten long enough that Rudi and I were able to meet up at the garden to get a few more plants in the ground. We ate our first two strawberries of the season (mine was a bit sweet-sour), admired all our sprouted seeds, tied some string to train our peas upward, and added tomatoes, peppers, an eggplant, and a rosemary to our plot. (I still have to plant peanuts and potatoes and squash. Maybe after the rain…)

Monday is a good tv night for us, so we came home to curl up in the living room to watch a lineup of Chuck, Big Bang Theory, and Castle. We ate fondue for dinner and followed it up with a smidge of fudge. I knit. Rudi washed the dishes.

It was a good way to start the week.

Because while back in Middletown sometimes my ripe tomatoes would walk, never did the whole plant disappear…

From the sign currently attached to our railing upstairs, behind which once sat a lovely rosemary plant:

Dear Plant Thief,

There are only three scenarios we can envision when taking someone else’s plant are acceptable:

1. You have Alzheimer’s or some other degenerative brain function disease and honestly believed that you lived here and this plant was yours. If this was the case, you have bigger problems and are forgiven.

2. You are homeless and are trying to chew herbal sprigs to keep your boss or teacher from finding out from your rotten breath. If this was the case, bring back our plant & we’ll leave you a toothbrush instead.

3. You weren’t paying attention and your dog peed on our plant. Thinking that it wasn’t hygienic to let us eat the plant anymore, you took our plant hoping to replace it with an identical one from the garden shop this evening. If this was the case, we expect to see a rosemary plant here this evening.

If you don’t fall into any of these categories and you took our rosemary plant, then you are just a mean person and your parents didn’t raise you right.

Bring back our rosemary plant!

Outraged,

Your Neighbors

This would refer to the only plant that survived the great plant-napping of last August:

Can’t you just feel my outrage in this picture of the sign I made back then? (Kudos to Sarah, who I knew snapped the shot, even if it took me a while to track it down.)