Tuesday, June 22, 2010

happy summer solstice!

i can’t describe how excellent it feels to put this weekend behind me. granted, fun times were had--friday night was an LGBTQIA community awards ceremony and saturday was boise’s 20th annual pride rally/parade/festival, reed came with me for the first time, we ran into so many of our friends, i got some great photos, we had a nice dinner afterwards...but then dreaded sunday descended upon me with due dates galore, plus miserable allergies from the crazy amounts of pollen in the air right now.

i had three sets of photos (one of them huge) and two articles (one of them a higher word count than i had thought) due sunday. PLUS, to make my life so much easier and more fabulous, my computer decided to be infected with a really fucking annoying trojan that i didn’t have time to deal with. my day consisted of stressful procrastination, writing, editing photos, sneezing, feeling like shit, cursing my computer, being cantankerous and hating the world. i got rid of the trojan today, thank goodness, my allergies are much less severe, i’m in a way happier mood and i finished and submitted all the work i needed to get through. everything is better today. and it’s the first day of summer! longest day of the year! hooray!

it was still somewhat light out at 10pm tonight. i know this happens every year but it always amazes me anyway. above is the view from my back yard facing east at 10. my dad is visiting his brother in colorado springs right now and he said it’s light there at 5am and gets dark around 9pm...which kind of sucks, i’d much rather have less morning and more night light.

another reason to celebrate...my first tiny baby tomatoes appeared on sunday! the watched kettle finally boils! the “basket tomato” has about a half dozen of these:

so we’re one step closer to solving the mystery. they’re kind of a sausage-y shape, so it’s probably some sort of paste tomato. seems very prolific, too. i looked through seed catalogues and decided this is what i want it to be, but i doubt that’s what it is.

either this tomato is microscopic or my finger is enormous. this is one of the white currants, which are only about the size of a pea at maturity.

i wanted to pick something special from the garden today in honor of the first day of summer, so i pulled up my first carrot. it was small but tasty. i planned on these being larger by now--on the front of the seed packet it says 65 days to maturity...but then on the back of the packet it says 60-80 days. trickery!

this afternoon i finally planted the last of my sweet peppers, eggplants, squash and cucumbers, along with yet another tomato. more nasties, sunflowers and peas popped up, and the rattlesnake pole beans made their first appearance. this evening i went around tying up and staking tomatoes and sunflowers. the first yellow squash blossom opened this morning, all dirty and mud-splashed from last night’s gullywasher:

i harvested another assload of collards and pulled up all six remaining pak choi, then reseeded the area with carrots.

pak choi was a fun new thing to try but i think i’ve had enough of it for the rest of the season.

i stir fried the pak choi and collards together with garlic, olive oil, sesame seeds and balsamic vinegar. not my finest culinary moment...garlic and olive oil makes practically any veggie taste awesome but this was just a weird combination, unusually dense and slightly bitter...it needed some mushrooms and onions and maybe tofu, and i should’ve used soy sauce instead of balsamic.

3 comments:

Andrea said...

I'm never short of amazed at your lovely photos and bountiful garden!

Goneferalinidaho said...

Sounds like a fun and challenging weekend all in one. We'll have to keep track of these tomatoes!

Emily said...

thanks andrea! i wish i could share some of the produce with you--i bet you’d find more interesting things to make with it than what i’ve been doing.

goneferalinid--tomato tracking indeed. i don’t know about you but i check mine at least twice a day, all excited like i might discover a sudden miraculous ripening (never mind that the fruits are only a few millimeters long and don’t grow perceptibly in the brief hours between examinations...)