YUM!
We harvested ALL of the garlic in our garden this week, and we consumed it all in the form of mighty mighty garlic bread. Originally I intended to cure some of it, but the crab grass was intruding mightily on the garlic patch, and all of the nutrients were being stolen away from my little bulbs, so I decided to just yank them all up and enjoy. 
There weren't that many bulbs and most of them were not that big anyway, but they were delicious!
Next year we'll hopefully be rid of the crab grass and I can plant more garlic and do a better job of caring for it. Seriously, though, I had no idea how crazy the crab grass could be!
Everything is HUGE and blooming or fruiting! Cucumber blossoms,
tomato blossoms AND fruit,
raspberries (the bees love them!),
adorable string bean babies,
and eggplant and pepper blossoms, too. The strawberry plants are putting out runners, all the squash varieties are expanding mightily, the corn is getting high (as an elephant's eye), and the tomato vines are becoming unimaginably HUGE -- I need taller stakes and more cages! But I'm especially proud of this one, that I started from seed:
Tomato plants have a smell that takes me back to my mom's garden of my youth. I wasn't really too interested in it then -- I mean, what kid likes to eat vegetables? But now I'm glad I have such an experienced gardener to call on for advice.
Our garden is pretty much planted and ready for the season of growing! I am so excited -- every morning, one of my favorite things to do when Jonah takes his first nap is to go out into the garden with a cup of coffee and survey the progress. I'm especially excited to see new seedlings come up and increase in size, like here:
On the box in the left are corn and sunflowers -- about half the corn is from seed, the other half I bought as seedlings from Meadow View Farm in Southwick, MA, about 15 minutes from here. I love that place! It has mad crazy amounts of plants, and is only open May and June. I was so sad when most of my seedlings kind of dwindled off -- my visions of having a "from scratch" garden full of heirloom varieties were going up in smoke. But I learned lessons from this -- like not to leave little seedlings out overnight when the temperatures are low, even if the days are sunny and springlike. And little seedlings need lots of sunlight, something we don't have a ton of in our house -- I'll have to figure out a solution to that for next year. But anyway, I remembered that this is a learning year, and I still wanted us to have some veggies to harvest, so I gave in and bought a ton of seedlings. Happily, Meadow View had lots of heirloom tomato varieties.
The jungle-like bushes you see are raspberries, which were there when we moved in.
And a pepper plant with the pansies and catmint.
Three of the first radishes are ready to be harvested! Dave ate them tonight and said they were way better than store-bought -- the highest compliment to me! I tried them, but don't really like radishes anyway.
I planted a new patch of them about a week ago, and they're starting to sprout too (they're the little green things in front of the mature radishes).
I had direct sown a lot of seeds in the garden, but hardly anything was coming up. So when I decided to plant purchased seedlings, I covered up a lot of the garden with salt marsh hay to keep down the weeds. But I think I was too impatient -- a bunch of cucumber sprouts started poking through the hay, so I cleared the area and stuck stakes next to them so we wouldn't step on them (since they were in the middle of the row!) We are going to have so many cucumbers, because besides the ones that sprouted from seed, my mom gave me a bunch of seedlings that she grew from seed. So we have about 10 cucumber plants!
We put down the hay to keep the weeds away, and to help the soil become more fertile next year, after we till everything into the ground at the end of the season. And it's not just weeds that the hay keeps away, it's grass -- since this used to be part of our lawn, lots and lots of grass keeps trying to grow where we tilled. We could really use this grass in other parts of our lawn, but it insists on growing where we DON'T want it. See it starting to surround the garlic?
This fall we'll cover the entire garden with some sort of mulch after we till everything under. That should help keep some of the grass away.
Also, I transplanted a lot of the vegetable and herb seedlings into bigger pots.
And this is where Dave and his dad roto-tilled for a garden a few weeks ago. I think I need to mulch. Notice that you can't really tell where our lawn ends and our garden begins? That's because our yard is very very brown. I think we have to invest in some grass seed!
Still no knitting or spinning going on here, but the Guru was here with Mr. Guru this weekend, and she was knitting a sock in all of her spare time. It really woke up my knitting bug again!
We also planted some garlic, and I "think" these are the sprouts of those bulbs, although I'm not sure -- the previous owners could have planted some other bulbs in this area too. We're excited to see what comes up in our yard.
We tilled a little bit by hand to plant the garlic bulbs, but in the next week or two we are going to rent a tiller and plow up some of the yard for a real garden. I started some seedlings in my "greenhouse" a few weeks ago, and as long as Kingston doesn't feast on them, they'll go into the garden and try to become vegetables. 
Dave gave me a whole bunch of heirloom and organic seeds for Christmas. We have various types of tomatoes and peppers growing in the greenhouse, along with eggplant, basil, parsley and sage. Hopefully more will sprout soon, and then I also have many different seeds to sow directly into the ground. I'm not getting my hopes up that this year will be a perfect garden, because we are basically just plowing up the lawn of crab grass and tilling it over a few times. I know the soil will have to be fertilized to get it to the right PH level, and maybe we'll need some top soil too, but for this year, we're just going with the basic till and plant method. As one of my new friends in town, who is a for real farmer, says, "Plants want to grow" -- I hope they will!
I have good news, though -- my right hand is back to normal! No more numbness! That means I can knit again -- when I get a bit of free time, that is. I really want to make an organic cotton blanket for Jonah. I wanted to do it the whole time I was pregnant, but wasn't able to.
I really haven't been doing much other than tending to the baby's every need. And that kind of suits me just fine right now!
Also, I wanted to share these pictures of the wonderful handmade gifts my knitting group in South Bend (aka Frog Pond Fiber Arts) sent me. It was such a happy package to receive, and right before Jonah was born. It really meant a lot to me, those ladies put so much effort into these presents. You can be sure you will see photos of Jonah modeling this booty in the weeks and months to come. I'm sorry it took so long to post the picture of these awesome presents, but right after I received the package, "stuff" happened!
I had the funniest experience voting for the first time in our new town. I'm used to the old school voting machines with the lever, and as we went into the school gym we saw all these little boxes. I was thinking, "Cool, high tech computers for voting!" So the woman checking us in asked if we've ever voted before, and I said, "Yes, but not with these new machines." She handed me a folder with a piece of paper in it and basically said, "Take this over to any 'privacy booth' and fill in the dot next to the name you want to vote for then put it in that box over there." What??? Total regression to 1800's technology! I guess there is a paper trail, but still...
We are so in love with Jonah Gino, born January 25, 2008, at 2:44pm. He weighed in at 6lbs 15oz. We're all doing great, we just got home from the hospital today. More details later!
Bacon is due in 2 days, but of course that doesn't mean he'll actually be here in 2 days. So we're just waiting. In the meantime, David and I went out for a great dinner at Metro Bis last night to celebrate my 34th birthday -- I guess I'll never be a 33 year-old mom! Also, David gave me a great present -- hand cards! I've been wanting a set almost since I started spinning. I can't wait to wash the fleece that has been stinking up our closet and prep it -- carding is so relaxing.
I'm still bummed that my numb hand is preventing me from knitting at this point in my pregnancy, but luckily I have some talented friends to cover me (or to cover Bacon) in this area. I should have posted these pics a loooong time ago, because I received them all (except the socks) at our baby shower in November...but better late than never. The blue blanket was knit by my childhood friend's mom, and the colorful blanket was made by Dave's Ciocia Pat. The adorable and lusciously soft alpaca sweater is from the guru herself, and so are the socks (but those are for me!) And of course Bacon has the knit dinos made by Claudine, which I did get to show you a few months ago.
night after the baby is born. If we were still in NYC, take out would be a most welcome option, but the restaurants out here don't deliver and it gets COLD. We've had snow on the ground since early December -- maybe it will melt next week when the temperatures get into the 50's, but I'm not holding my breath. I like the snow, but then again at this point I'm absolved from any shoveling duties and Dave scrapes the ice off my car every morning before work -- so my take on the weather is a bit skewed by my lack of responsibility for dealing with its side effects.
