House of Roses

Quiet Garden

While my peppers (from seed) and okra (from seed) are getting bigger and bigger, they’re still not ready to get set out, I think. (Not until it stays this warm.)

However, the outside stuff is also going well. The tomatoes (in non-hanging pots) are beginning to outgrow their bird nets (and so I’ll need to take those down, soon):

I should thin the carrots but I am reluctant to pull up any of these beautiful and odd shaped leaves before they turn into carrot fronds:

It’s an experiment after all. I promise to thin the ones in the larger container.

The morning glories are continuing to surprise me. Now that their two large leaves are of sufficient size, I guess they’re deciding to make another pair:

And I’m loving the ivy geranium:

I wish I had bought more. I desperately hope that there will be some still at the garden store when I get back from traveling; I have a whole new pot for them.

Gardening | Comment (1)

Penultimate Haul

On May 18th, I picked up our penultimate meat share. (For July-December, we’re going to try another farm, one that picks up in Arlington so that I don’t spend 2.5 hours on a Sunday sitting on the T.) This time we got:

• ~6 lb chicken
• 1 lb pork cutlet
• 1.5 lb pork chop
• 0.5 lb leg of lamb
• 1 lb ground lamb
• 1 lb ground pork

So far, it’s been mostly disappointments, surprisingly. The 1 pound of pork cutlet wasn’t; it was more like pork sliced to prosciutto-thinness. There’s not anything wrong with that specifically, unless one has planned to make pork cutlet for dinner and is left, instead, with, well, I don’t know how to describe it. Weird.

Also, the chicken wasn’t as good as the $23 chicken from Whole Foods.

(Digression: Whole Foods sells some amazing chicken whose species name I don’t have at hand and which is worth every penny of that $23. I’ll have to post about that, too, later.)

It was big and it cooked nicely and tastes fine. It doesn’t taste extraordinary, which is what I was hoping for. The Stillman’s beef tastes extraordinary, and the lamb, so I had reason to hope. However, it’ll feed us for nearly the whole week and that’s what’s most important.

I am, however, already looking forward to making gyros again, since that does not disappoint.

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Memorial Day bike ride

I took a 16.7-mile bike ride today, mostly just to enjoy the nice weather.

I started by taking Broadway up to Arlington Center, where I stopped at the craft store and bought materials for a craft project. Hopefully, more about that before too long.

Then I tried to find my way down to the bike path and ended up going under it, on Pond street. I walked my bike along the park until I got back to the path at Linwood, took it back to Alewife, and then took the streets over to the path by Concord Ave. That took me to Huron Ave, from which I took Sparks to Memorial Drive and the Charles River paths.

For a change I took the next bridge over to the Boston side, and cruised along the riverside towards the ocean. 4 miles of that later, I got to the new park I had seen across the water last trip. It’s small but pretty, and it connects to what looks like the beginning of a pedestrian cross-river bridge next to the commuter rail bridge. The pedestrian bridge is unfinished (I guess they’ll have to make it a drawbridge too?) but I got to watch the rail bridge come back down and reconnect with the stationary rails, which was pretty cool.

Then, back across the river to Cambridge, and back homewards. I followed the bike-map-suggested route along Gore instead of taking the highway again, but the route I had planned based on the map hit an unmarked one-way at Boston street, so I went through Union Square instead (with a brief, failed attempt to go around it), along Somerville, up Central, and Highland to Davis and home. Whee!

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Doodling based on my initials

Here’s a doodle based on the first and last letters of my first name, my middle initial and a dot, and the first and last letters of my last name.

I guess I’m in kind of a logo mood lately :)

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Plant Update

Next year (I promise) I will actually write up the whole process of deciding what to plant (which boils down to figure out what you like to eat, figure out what pots you have, and associate pots and plants, really) but I already have babies in the seedling greenhouse:

Two weeks ago I took some yogurt containers, drilled holes, put in some stones for drainage, and some dirt:

and then transplanted the larger of the seedlings:

Of course, some of them have decided they don’t like living outside the greenhouse and I’m still trying to figure out why, but about half of them are already on their third leaves! Only beets and okra so far.

Outside, I’ve got poppies and carrots, and the chives, of course, and some incredibly stubborn strawberry (juneberry?) plant from last summer. In the greenhouse are globe amaranth, more beets, peppers (hot and sweet), and Thai basil.

GREEN!

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First comp copy of Star-Diary arrives

I got my first comp copy of the book One Hundred Year Star-Diary which I worked on with Alec Finlay. It’s a little bigger than I expected! Pictures below.
Cover:

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