Can I just complain really quick and say, Flickr, you sometimes suck. I am working on my flickr account–trying to make it more manageable for people who visit (over 10,000 photos, oye…the power of the uploader). At any rate, I mass-changed the privacy on my photos, which changed the URLs for image source, soooooo…there are now a lot of lovely “image not available” messages all over my site. Rats AND Be forewarned!

And now for something completely different:

How lovely is that? Almost a perfect patch of this dianthus growing in front of our house, except for the place where little kitties have tried to sleep.

The garden–despite delays due to a long, wet spring, is coming along nicely. We signed up for a CSA with these folks, just in case we don’t produce enough to put away for the winter. It’s difficult to transition from one growing space to another, but overall, I don’t think we did too badly:

If you click on the image above, you can see some left over bits from last year’s garden on the hill just past the grapes. We’re starting our mini-orchard and berry patch out that way. In the foreground, you can see our crazy-quilt style of gardening. Basically, we were cleaning out the garage (oh, wonderful and Finally) and thought, hey, we could grow something in this! And hey, why not throw this out there, fill it with soil and experiment with veggies that the clay would normally deter. And how about those enormous rolls of old upholstery fabric to use as mulch? And so on and so forth. I was really inspired by my trip to the Southwest Heifer sites last year, and the resourcefulness of the gardeners. So yes, if you were to visit, you would see an old chest of drawers filled with soil in our garden, as well as old upholstery fabric for mulch, and bricks we salvaged from under a bridge in town.

I am just so happy with how well the garden is this year. I hope it will be one of our best growing seasons yet!

To end this, I present you with a mislabeled Escarole patch:

While in Boston this past March, I had the best escarole and meatball soup at La Piccola Venezia. I made my version of a meatball mix in April, froze it, and then planted a batch of escarole. Well…the time has come! I used an adapted version of this recipe. Yum yum yum…and it was worth the wait.