The garden is a work-in-progress and it’s been about a month since I started planted things. The beans and peas are climbing the tee-pee.

The broccoli is getting bigger.

The tomato plant has blossoms.

The squash (green and yellow) has sprouted and looks to be flourishing.

We also have peppers, cucumbers, bush beans, and strawberry greens growing in the garden. I planted cherry tomato and marigold seeds today. Later this week, I have four cherry tomatoes (complete with baby tomatoes already on their spindly stalks) and pumpkin seeds to put in the ground.

Because this May has been the wettest on record, I’ve had to do very little watering, which makes me happy. Gardening is much less fun when, as we had to do last year, you have to lug water half a mile from home…

In conclusion, I’m going to leave you with these shots I took of a vine that’s growing up the fence further up the community garden. I don’t know what it is, but its flowers are stunning.
[ETA: I love having smart friends. Julie has identified the mystery bloom as the Blue Passion Flower.]

I’m going to be mean and put off my Sheep and Wool Show and Tell until tomorrow.

Instead, I offer you Week One photos from my garden plot:

This is our gigantic sage plant, the lone holdout from the previous owner of our community garden plot. Believe it or not, the week before, when I was turning over the garden, I chopped a third of the plant off. (By the way, does anyone local need sage? Rudi and I are drowning in it.)

I am a lazy gardener. If I can get away with putting pre-bought plants into my garden, I will. Last year, my broccoli and lettuce plants did remarkably well, and, not being entirely devoid of sense, I figured I ought to buy some more for Year 2. Here they are in the ground and looking fine.

A week is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things. But in terms of a seed, it’s a lifetime. My peas and beans were already sending up little shoots after a mere week. Aren’t they adorable?

During Week 1, I added more beans and peas to my tee-pee trellis. Instead of following the directions on the seed packets, as I did last year (which netted me a small, if sincere, crop of peas), I opted this year to just plant them all in a confined area and see what happened. If nothing else, this ought to prevent me from accidentally pulling up the bean vines when I mistake them for early-stage Virginia Creeper.

(As you might guess from the above shot, I waited until it was raining to head to the garden. I swear it wasn’t raining as I was packing up to head over. In fact, I suspect the very first drops of mist touched down as I reached street level outside the Burrow. But by the time I was done in the garden, it was definitely coming down at a consistent drizzle.)

I also planted zucchini and yellow squash seeds. Again, I planted more of them this year than I did last year, when I was warned that I didn’t want to be overrun by squash. While that’s a fair warning, I can’t think that the half dozen squash I did pick last year was anything close to being an overwhelming harvest.

I leave you with this shot. Violets are one of my three favorite flowers. Mia thought I was crazy last year when I announced that Rudi and I had dug a bunch of them up from around the garden and replanted them in the back corner of the garden. But doesn’t it just look so lovely there?

Well, Rudi’s flight gets in in half an hour, so the weekend must be just about over. I did several of the things I wanted to do this weekend, but not as much as I’d hoped to. I suppose that’s always the way, though, isn’t it?

Yesterday, as planned, I headed over to Alexandria to make more beer. The ironic thing about this is that I don’t drink beer. But Rudi does, as do our friends, and it allowed me to spend pretty much the whole day hanging out with several of them. Now if I could just figure out where to put three cases of beer (in addition to the four cases of root beer from last weekend).

Today I bought a couple things at the farmers’ market — apples for me and a branch of Brussels sprouts for Rudi) — before heading over to the garden to start the winter prep. I harvested the last of the peppers and trimmed about half of the huge sage plant. I pulled up almost all of the plants. I dug out a tree we’d hoped would do more than it did. And I turned over the ground in the hopes that come spring it will be easier to work than it was this year. (That may or may not have any basis in reality.)

After I was done, I headed to the store and to the library to return my overdue books. I came home, finished my book, chatted with Rudi (who was patiently hanging out in Orlando’s airport watching the Pats game), and fell asleep. (Oops.)

I’ve spent the last couple hours cleaning, but I’m not sure that it shows. Oh well.

Tomorrow, we get to see The Police. I hope they’re better than a solo Sting concert.

Off to the airport!

I’m pleased to announce that I will be spending this weekend as weekends are meant to be spent — lazing.

I’m hoping to start the weekend off right with some friends tonight at a free jazz concert in the sculpture garden outside the National Gallery of Art.

Tomorrow morning, I will get up and go for a bike ride. I signed up for the third round of Runagogo! and fully intend to meet the 100 mile goal (over the course of 3 months) this time. Plus, I’ve been drinking a lot of sweet beverages and eating a lot of ice cream lately and it would behoove me to get moving. In a similar vein, I may try to get in some laps at the local community pool when I head over to the garden.

Speaking of which, I need to do some planting. The peas are done for the season and I see no reason to let the string lattice go to waste. So I’m going to plant some more beans there. Rudi’s mom has also suggested that we cut back the catnip and maybe the sage, so that will be another task. We might have some ripe peppers to harvest in addition to the broccoli and lettuce, so I’m excited about that.

I’m about a third of the way through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I don’t find it unreasonable to expect to be done with it by Sunday night. That gives me five days to plow through the penultimate book before the new one comes out at midnight on Friday night. We’ll be attending a launch party at Politics & Prose and are currently contemplating costumes. That robe I bought for grad school is going to come in handy again, methinks…

I’ll also be knitting. I’m nearly done with my first pair of socks for the Summer of Socks, in a lovely colorway of Cascade Fixation. I just have to finish the gusset decreases and the foot and I’ll be able to wear them with my pink Keds.

And I have to go buy some cotton/linen/hemp/nonstretchy fiber for a market bag. That’s the project I’m supposed to be working on right now for the Tour de France Knit-along. However, a week into the race, I’m still in London while the other riders race toward the Alps. Tant pis! But Bastille Day does seem like a good time to catch up, so I will play some Les Nubians albums and the soundtrack to Les Miserables and get to work.

Finally, the farmers’ market, is, as always, on my weekend agenda. The market folks warn this may be the final week for cherries and apricots, so I’ll need to pick some of those up, as well as more blueberries and tomatoes and beans and …

I just wanted to warn folks that blogging will continue to be irregular over the next three weeks. We head to Salt Lake on Wednesday to help Rudi’s mother recuperate following her hip replacement surgery. I return a bit before Rudi because of work obligations that will have me working the final two weekends of the month. The laptop will be going with us to SLC, but I’m not sure how much time there will be to post, given the caregiving and home maintenance responsibilities we have planned.

This weekend was spent cleaning the Burrow and doing laundry in preparation for heading out of town. It wasn’t all work and drudgery, though, as I also got some reading done and spent some time with Jenn and her husband, both of whom graduated from Conn a few years after Rudi and I did and who spent the first few days of their vacation touring the city’s sights. I don’t think we’ve seen Jenn in ten years, so it was great to be able to meet them for an Ethiopian dinner and cupcakey dessert following their two exhausting days of hiking the Mall and battling Girl Scouts.

I also headed over to the garden to water everything, string up the next level of twine for the peas to climb, and harvest some lettuce leaves and two Alpine strawberries. Some peas have flowers on them, my smallest broccoli plant sprouted a head (more the size of rabe than regular-sized at the moment), the pepper has buds, and the sunniest of our tomatoes has a lovely green orb. Leeks continue to mystify me, and the beans may need to be replanted after the town did some branch trimming that crushed a bunch of them early on. All in all, though, gardening remains a very satisfying experience. I look forward to July, when I hope to be able to add a swim in after my work sessions.

It’s been a pretty good week here in the Burrow. Last night after work, Rudi and I headed down to the garden to water our plants and to put in a couple of the ones we picked up over the weekend. We decided that the non-lettuce, lettuce-like plants were weeds and Rudi did the heavy digging to get them out of the ground. They had roots like huge sweet potatoes! Very scary! I had the much easier job of weeding and planting a tomato. And our pea plants are starting to send up little shoots! I’m very excited.

Oh, and it’s Thursday. So that probably means you’d like to see what’s been beautiful recently. Here are three items from the last week:

1. As I was blog-surfing this morning, I was suprised by Jeremiah hurtling out of the window and noise in the window well. Expecting to turn around and see someone working on the utility boxes, I instead found a baby squirrel. I’m not sure if it fell in or if it’s mom sent it down to explore, but the poor thing was freaked out. It kept scrambling around the well and grunting, as my three cats tried to figure out if they could break through the screen to catch it. Eventually it climbed out and followed mom up a tree, but returned about 30 minutes later to visit the cats again. I just hope the screen holds out.

2. As Rudi and I walked up 22nd last night, we approached a group of people standing next to the Schevenko statue. I don’t quite know why I expected it to happen, but it totally did not surprise me when they broke into an a cappella rendition of “For the Longest Time.” Must have been all those years in college hanging out with Jason and Kim…

3. Last week, I was hurrying through Metro Center at rush hour to get to the spot where I like to board the train. I happened to accidentally catch the eye of a woman getting onto the elevator to go downstairs to the other line and she considerately held the door for me in case I wanted to get in. I didn’t, but I really appreciated the thoughtfulness of the gesture.