sweet blog o' mine

Last updated: July 17? Where have I been all summer? Ah, the redundant question: a rhetorical staple I would probably not have to rely on if I'd actually been blogging more than once every six weeks. This has been the busiest summer of my life, I think, but also really fulfilling professionally. Internship #1 marked kind of a turning point: I started to stop feeling like a journalist pretending to be learning to be a librarian because I was writing a story about it, and now I just feel like a person who used to be a journalist and is currently learning to be a librarian. If that makes sense.

I'm looking back at photos of the garden from August of last year, and hoo boy are we behind. But, behold:
The very first ripe tomatoes, hooray. Those are the sungolds, and they're delicious -- I'm a little reluctant to eat them right off the vine when they're warm from the sun (all that fungicide I'm still spraying every week is not exactly appetizing) but they're amazingly sweet and wonderful after they've been washed.

Happy herbs:
J. is so into the dill, some of which is starting to flower, that I made him a birthday meal consisting of seared scallops with lemon and dill, roasted vegetables with dill, and dill, red onion and cheese drop biscuits. Three dill-icious dishes. Oh ha.

And here's a newcomer:
I had no idea that cucumbers looked like cacti when they first come in, but that thing is seriously spiky.

Another newcomer: I don't know, you guys. It's pretty and all, etc. etc., but you can't eat it. Cutting the little flowerbed feels wrong too, so it's not even like I take the nasturtiums and marigolds and wildflowers home with me. They're just being pretty and all in the middle of a weed-filled garden, in the middle of a field where no one sees them except for me and H. when we go to spend an hour weeding or gathering peas and cilantro for dinner. I have seen exactly none of the bug-deterring effects that were promised, although I somehow managed to plant the flower bed in just about the farthest spot from all of my producing plants. S-M-R-T!

Speaking of dinner:
It seems like the only unqualified successes this season are the new things -- the peas and the bush beans. The tri-color ones are especially awesome; those purple beans are bright green inside, and they all taste fantastic despite the fact that the Japanese beetles have turned their leaves to lace.