Green Thumb. Who knew?

In the time since we bought all that cow poop, our garden has been planted, watered, and grown completely out of control.

Recognizing that we are complete amateurs at the whole gardening thing, we bought a half-dozen books on the topic of growing your own vegetables. With lots of color pictures. All of them talked about creating a garden plan, and thinking through the order and timing of what you planted. Also, we spent time reading the packages of various seeds, looking at the climate, requirements and spacing of each crop, and the pretty temperature zone maps for each vegetable.

And then we ignored them all, and put seeds in every spot of bare earth we could find. Um. Yeah. Turns out, there's a reason they tell you to space the zucchini (courgette) out a little. Because each plant grows to be approximately the size of a beluga whale.

Just before we headed to England in June, we began harvesting the first couple of little radishes. Soon, we added a few leaves of lettuce. And then WHAM! One day, the entire garden came into fruit. Now we're harvesting zucchini blossoms to stuff with ricotta and fry, tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, squash, kale, you name it. We got it. I'm giving it away to the neighbors, and planning on how much I can bring in to work for my colleagues. What I'd really like to do is start canning and preserving some of it for eating in the winter, but my freezers are already full as it is - I think I need to take some canning classes and figure out how to use our cellar like they did back in the day.

OK, so I wouldn't have a clue to keep any of this long enough to last me through the winter like the settlers did, but man - we are enjoying the hell out of it while it's fresh. I don't even mind the weeding - I find it strangely therapeutic to spend time down in the dirt, pulling back the vegetable leaves and tearing up the little shoots of thieving weeds to make sure the garden spends all its energy on making more lovely food for our table. And we're already planning next year's crop, learning from this one (lesson #1, when they say put a foot or more between any member of the squash family, they're not kidding...)