A day in the garden

Today I finally had time for gardening! I'm trying to do some quick sprucing-up as I'm having friends over for the Solstice on Wednesday. In truth, there are a summer's worth of chores to do in the yard, but it felt good to get started even just a little.

The above picture shows my two raised bed planting boxes. The closer of the two is where I planned to put my veggies. The back one will (soon) hold a themed "tea garden," a project for a Grey School class. I'll be growing all kinds of herbs for use in culinary and medicinal teas.

Anyway, I spent almost three hours, and managed to get the first box all planted, including installation of drip irrigation and tomato cages. I planted 4 tomato plants, 2 basils, and a couple of trays of butter lettuce and mesclun. Plus marigolds to keep the little sluggies away. Here's what it looks like now.....

I was poking around in the weedy area next to the beds and found a gift from the garden. A couple of months ago, we planted peas in that space. They didn't come up,--we figured they'd rotted and just sort of forgot about them, especially after the weeds grew up. But today, I found that the peas had not only sprouted and grown, but were wound in and among the weeds, hidden and heavy with sweet peas. Guess what I'm having for dinner?

My muscles are sore tonight, and I might have burned my nose a bit. But it felt good to be out working in the dirt, under the sun.

In another piece of news too long in coming, the American Heart Association has FINALLY come out officially against "trans fats," a.k.a. partially hydrogenated oils. These non-foods aren't even recognized by our bodies, and are responsible for raising LDL (bad cholesterol) and cretaing a lot of heart disease. The AHA is recommending that trans fats comprise 1% or less of our daily diet. As I said, finally. This gives us yet another good reason to avoid fast food places which all--except, I think, for Burgerville--use trans fats for frying andf in their baked goods.