A truly wonderful day today. Brunch, farmer’s market, gardening, and strawberry shortcake. Life does not get better than this.
On the downside, I got poison ivy a few days ago. It’s a remarkably contained patch, just up the wrist from where my gardening gloves stop, so it was obviously a glancing blow, and I must have washed it off immediately, because despite two or three more days, no more patches have appeared. Still itches, though.
Kevin spotted a spectacular lizard hanging out in the pile of defunct kid’s play equipment that needs to get dragged down to the dump one of these days. It was an adult male broadhead skink! The image doesn’t really express the sheer SIZE of the lizard, which is over a foot long and very thick. They’re a completely different scale than the little whippy blue-tailed ones that run all over, or the little green anoles that cover everything later in the year.
On a whim, we picked up some cantaloupe starts at the Farmer’s Market, which left us with the problem of where to put them, which is why Kevin built a vegetable bed in the backyard this afternoon. Needs more dirt, but he laid out the borders in more lengths of downed pine (there’s scads of it from an ice storm in 2002, and I’ve been using it for bed edging.)
I had not planned to grow vegetables, but hey, cantaloupe. I figure they will A) all die, B) we will get ONE undersized cantaloupe or C) there will be FIFTY MILLION of them, and we will eventually have to change our names and move to Costa Rica to escape the ravening vegetable hordes.
With the rest of the bed left to fill, I’m wondering what else to grow–we don’t do a lot of cooking from scratch, and there’s already plenty of tomatoes on the patio. (We got something called a jellybean tomato, which is supposed to produce teeny tiny tomatoes that supposedly do not taste like a cherry tomato. Who can pass up such a thing?) I’m thinking strawberries, basil, and onion, as we’d be likely to actually use the onion, homemade pesto is a beautiful thing, and having just had fresh, homegrown, not-gas-ripened-supermarket strawberries–with cream–I am suddenly less sanguine about my plan to get maybe one or two random strawberries from the ones out front. I don’t know how many one is likely to harvest, but even a single strawberry with cream for the occasional breakfast garnish suddenly seems like a Wonderful Thing.
Also, I picked up some paint. I am going to paint random doors bright colors. I feelthe need. The fact that Kevin is unconcerned about me attacking doors with colors with names like "Fireberry Red" and "Roman Violet" is a good sign.
Never fear, he’s the one who will actually remove doors from hinges. No sense tempting fate…"OH GOD!" "Wow. How did you get a door in your eye?"
