three years

Happy anniversary to me and Elinor today.

I’m still waiting for the bike racks to arrive from Nashbar. It’s frustrating: the weather is getting hotter and biking with a satchel strapped to my back is a sweatier proposition by the week. Meanwhile, the panniers are sitting in a closet at home, unused and unusable. Today I stopped at a local garden center, on my route home from work as luck would have it, and bought some flowers (a live plant in a pot) and had to bike it home hanging from my handlebars. Good thing they had bags with handles.

Today I’m a little sore, even though I took it easy over the weekend, walking around town instead of biking. Friday I was running behind and needed to be at work by a certain time, so I sprinted the whole way. I’m still paying for it.

I’m also sore partly from the gardening (aka “weeding”) work I did yesterday and over the weekend. Our tomatoes are on the verge of being choked out, so the weeds needed to be cleared pronto. It wasn’t all bad. The baby basil plants are doing just fine after I uprooted them, took them apart from the surrounding weeds, and re-planted them when they were still very tiny. They’re taller now and have several ranks of leaves, so I think they’ll make it. Over the last few days I’ve also discovered several second-generation tomato plants, seeded and grown up from fallen tomatoes in last year’s garden. This is a definite advantage to not having used the anti-seed-germination stuff early on – all these little seedlings would never have made it. Now the baby tomato plants will make a nice surprise for us later in the summer: Which kind are they?

among the weeds

Elinor and I have had a tomato garden for the last two summers and we’re growing one again this year. We generally grow basil and some peppers and other things in the spaces between the tomatoes. Yesterday evening around dusk I was out weeding the garden. It was tough going – we haven’t been good about weeding lately and some grasses were taking over one end and along the edges. So I was on my knees prying up grass plants one at a time when I noticed a tiny, two-leaf basil plant trying to make it in the grass jungle. A second generation basil plant! I didn’t even know last year’s crop had gone to seed. We grew our basil from seed last year and it was really successful, making humongous plants with trunks bigger than my thumb at the base, so I guess I’m not surprised. A little later I discovered another little seedling.

I dug up huge clods of earth under and around the seedlings so I could pick out the grass as carefully as I could, trying not to damage the basil roots, then replanted the seedlings in clear, weed-free soil. Even though we have some purchased basil seedlings to add to the garden, I really hope these two little guys make it.