Spectacular Growth!

Hey, remember that corn I planted a little over a month ago? Well, it's almost as tall as I am now! Sunflowers too. The potatoes are flowering, which means we'll be digging fresh spuds in two weeks, and everything else is near ready to harvest. We made our first batch of fresh garden pesto (is there anything better!), and have been picking greens to steam with poached eggs for breakfast in the morning. It's one of the most satisfying things in this world to me -- walking over in the morning to the garden, steaming mug in hand, to pick greens for my breakfast. Ahhhh.

I've been gone for a few days (only four actually, although it feels like weeks) helping my dear friends move their lives north to Eugene, Or. It was a pleasant trip, if bittersweet -- I spent lots of great quality time with my friends and my sweet god kids and I got to see some great new places, including Mt. Shasta and Portland (I loved it, and I am making plans to drag Man O' Mine up there in early September). But it was sad to see my friends move farther from us. Seems like normal people with families can't really afford to live in this most expensive of states any more, and that's a drag. I will really miss having these wonderful people, who are really more like family than friends, within a day's trip of us. But I know they'll be much happier up there. The kids will have a safe space to be kids that will be much better than anything offered in the urban bay area where they were living. So that's a good thing.

We're deep in the June gloom here on the coast. While the Gloom (days of low fog and no sunshine) makes me moody and is bound to slow garden growth a little, my body is so much happier in a moist cool climate than it is in a hot dry one that I really don't mind it. I know it's foggy here because it's upward of 100 degrees inland, and I do not do well with hot and dry. I am basically non-functional above 90 degrees, and here I can be out in the garden (or at the beach, which is warm and pleasant even in the steamy fog) all day.

Here are some good pictures of the garden's spectacular growth. First, one taken ten days ago (note that it was sunny), on 6/16, for comparison:



Next, a photo taken today from approximately the same angle (yowzah -- check out that sunflower!):



The tomatoes, and one monster tomatillo (the tall one with the yellow flowers, in the foreground):



A colorful assortment of happy little lettuces:



And last, the happy foundation for summer pesto:



We're making pesto tonight, actually, and a cherry pie with some fat organic cherries that Man O' Mine and I picked up at the new farmer's market in our neighborhood after a pleasant bike ride on Saturday. Mmmm, pesto. Mmmm, fresh cherry pie.

I love summer!

Structure

Over the weekend, we had a visit from Number One Godson and Only Goddaughter. Only Goddaughter and I spent quite a bit of time in the garden together, planting seeds, watering starts, and building structures. I'm particularly proud of the bean structure we built together, which once populated with bean vines will serve as a lovely privacy screen for the garden. Only Goddaughter helped out quite a bit with the building of said bean structure, holding string and handing me zip ties to bind the poles together. I must say, it was very nice to have an extra pair of hands, be they tiny, sticky hands at that.

Speaking of structure, boy do kids need a lot of it. I suppose it's a choice to provide kids with structure, just as it's a choice to provide structure to plants. I've certainly experimented a great deal with structure in the garden ; I've spent little to no time with my plants, let them become wild and bushy and tangled, and I've also pinned them so tightly to their cages and poles that they've choked. The balance, as with most things, lies somewhere between. I try to provide enough structure that things can take a happy, healthy, natural course, but not so much that there are no options if I'm not around. The same seems to work pretty well with kids.

Man O' Mine and I talk a lot these days about having kids (well, actually, just kid -- we plan to outnumber our offspring, as we're certain that DNA will play a dirty trick and give the child both the combined sum of our intelligence and a genius for rotten and devious behaviours that will be horrible in a truly suprising manner). But man, kids are exhausting! I know that Mom and Dad of Duo Godsons and Only Goddaughter are probably reading this right now and laughing, but seriously, two kids collectively managed to wipe me out! Godson Number One is ten and moves with such energy and frenetic joy that it tires me just to watch him. And Only Goddaughter is in her "Why-No" phase right now, and has perfected a certain tactic of repeatedly questioning the "whys" of the world that would break a hardened criminal. And what's with not wanting to go to sleep? And waking up with the first songbirds? Man, I can't wait to go to sleep, and once I am asleep, I like to stay that way a good long while. I think that's a marked sign of adulthood actually -- you start to enjoy sleep almost as much as you enjoy being awake.

Still, shagged out or no, it was absolutely delightful to share the weekend with the kids. And getting up at dawn wasn't that bad --- it gave me a lovely excuse to walk out to the garden just as the sun was rising to pick and eat strawberries with an adorable little girl.