Our garden is wonderful. It's relaxing to tend, especially now that weeding isn't a huge chore like it was last summer. We have lots of small green blackberries that will become big, delicious fruit, and pea-vines climbing our fences, tomatoes sprouting up everwhere, even out of the brick patio. We have a lot of small herb plants that we're hoping will get bigger, and some seeds to bring up new stuff. I got an Asian jasmine plant, to trail over the fence and along the ground, and to smell the sweet perfume of my namesake. And as of this week, big white roses!

In fact, this is a great time of year because it's not yet mosquito season, so it's nice in the warm evenings to sit out back and read and just be outside. I really look forward to the fireflies this year, too. The only disadvantage is that if you get really excited about something in your garden--jasmine say, or blackberries--you will not be fulfilled anytime soon. Your garden flourishes while you are elsewhere living your life, and it takes a lot of patience. It's a strange thing in that you can only really enjoy it passively, as an environment rather than an achievement.

By the way, more of you should give me book recommendations! I know lots of you read, and I expect to compile a big list of books to last quite some time here. Don't hold out on me! :)

blackberry flower, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Our garden is doing better this year than last year. We have the two rosebushes established in pots from last year which are now 2' and 3' tall, which aren't blooming just yet. We also have our blackberry plant, which spent last year covering a trellis with canes. These canes turned red and orange over the winter, and I was vaguely afraid they would die, and then they turned green again and now it is blooming! It heartens me to know that every flower will turn into a big juicy berry, to be eaten outside on a hot day in the sun with Ben.

Last year our attempts to grow herbs from seed met with failure: we only managed to get parsley, cilantro, and thyme to sprout. This year we tried cultivating seeds inside first, and they flourished but died before we could get them into the ground. So we bought some from a preschool having a plant sale, and now we have little plants of rosemary, sage, basil, lavender, peppermint, and recao. We also got a habanero plant and two tomato plants. And we were planning to plant peas again, and we had gotten some sugar snap peas which were in the fridge too long and sprouted... so we planted them in the ground, and now they are tiny vines grabbing the fence! We will plant the parsley, cilantro, and thyme from seed again, since that worked fine last year. I can't wait for the peppers and tomatoes and peas, not to mention the blackberries... and I also can't wait for the herbs to get big enough that I can start tearing off leaves and seasoning things with them.

Oh, and we recently did something to make our tiny backyard even more awesome! We got a small charcoal grill. It makes great burgers and also great grilled eggplant and mushroom sandwiches, and later this week we plan to make grilled corn on the cob. I used to think a grill was redundant over our broiler, but it was really cheap and the food really tastes more smoky and delicious. Plus when it is really hot during the summer, we won't have to be making heat inside the house to cook with.

It's beautiful today, blue sky and warm but not hot, and soon I'm going to the train station to pick up Steph. This last week in particular has made me realize that I am really coming to love Philly.

Some of it is getting out more, seeing the fun neighborhoods and things to do, the culmination of slowly trying to get to know the city over the last year. It's also partly the weather... I was really dreading living here for the summer, because when we moved here permanently last August it was just miserable, in terms of both temperature and humidity, and I dreaded three months a year like that. But even though I know I still have July and August to get to, I was surprised to find that June hasn't been that bad. In New Mexico, I always found June to be the worst month, where it was straight hot and no breaks. But July and August there are monsoon season, with thunderstorms every afternoon, which is actually pretty fun. Here June isn't like that; sometimes there are really hot and humid days, like the day I left for LA when it was 95 and very humid. But mostly it's been tolerable, with sometimes weeks of mid-70s and cold at night! I can take the occasional hot day, which is all we've gotten so far. Of course, I'm inside all day on weekdays, in a heavily air-conditioned building. But I do have a twenty minute walk to and from work each day. Anyhow, it's a relief to know that I only have to deal with two months of yucky summer.

Another thing that has certainly contributed is our house, which I love, and our garden, which I am coming to love. Now, our initial plans ended up gang agley, probably because the seeds weren't watered enough while we were both gone for a week. So most of the exciting and wonderful things we planted don't seem to have sprouted, though we do have peas, tomatoes, cilantro, and parsley at the very least. But some things are growing, and I'm thinking of getting cheap tiny pots and starting some seedlings in those for the herbs we really wanted that didn't come up. I mean, we still have loads of seeds. The rest of our yard is a profusion of weeds, beautiful thriving ones. And in fact, I spent a lot of time weeding the patch where stuff is planted, which is sort of enjoyable. It's sort of like my backyard is offended that we put seeds in it, and killed off our seeds and replaced them with morning glories in a massive attempt to give us the finger. 'You think I need help to grow things?!'

Something that occurred to me with the roses I bought last weekend is that they will probably get really big. See, my mom grew many roses in New Mexico, and is an excellent gardener, and almost without exception all of her roses are two or three feet high. So I thought this was the height that mature roses get to, until I saw roses growing around London and Philly in the last few months and saw ones that are six or seven feet high. Gigantic! At first I thought it was some sort of super-rose breed, until I realized that New Mexico is a desert, and the only wild roses you see there are those tiny ground-cover ones, and probably if you grow a plant in the environment it's suited to, it'll get much bigger. Something to look forward to!

Of course, something that's helping me immensely to enjoy Philly more is the lack of problem sets I have now. And while I probably will take one or two more problem set classes, I'll never take more than one at once, so this is a condition I will happily continue in. :)

I had a nice weekend. My flight out to Los Angeles was seven hours delayed, due to some clouds 50,000 feet high which we had to wait to settle down, so I got in at 3:30 AM. I was really excited as I was going to the airport, but I guess cross-country flights are less straightforward and less clear-shot than just hopping down the coast. Plus the time zone really did make a difference, since I wasn't there long enough to adjust. But we had a lot of fun: ate breakfasts at a sunny coffee shop, went to the beach with Erin and Josh and Ben's roommate John, watched Police Story, played Carcassonne, had sushi in Santa Monica, cuddled while watching The Empire Strikes Back.

( ways in which this weekend was different )

And now I'm back, and I'm making progress in my work, and trying to get caught up on my chores. My favorite pair of jeans ripped while I was in LA, so maybe I can mend those... and I want to finish Juneteenth, the other Ralph Ellison book, so that I can start rereading Harry Potter. :) I should also clean up... when I came back yesterday, I noticed that one of our mouse traps had moved onto a vent in the dining room... then noticed the tail protruding from it. A mouse got its leg caught in the trap, tried to go down the vent, and died there. I was concerned that the mouse would be stuck in the vent, and I would have to take drastic measures (or have a professional take them on my behalf) to remove it, but it slid right out. But now things feel unclean.

Our garden grows slowly, in fits and starts, not nearly as fast as our weeds. But we have pea-vines!

When we moved in to our house last August, we said that we wanted to plant an herb garden in the part of our small backyard which doesn't have brick patio. We also knew that fall is not the time to plant things, and that we had so much household stuff to do anyways, we were a little relieved not to have yardwork to do on top of that. But now it is spring, and we have settled in. It finally warmed up and stopped snowing, and as of yesterday I'm done with my quals. It's time to plant!

cultivating, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

We ordered a lot of seeds online for the herb garden part, from a company in western Pennsylvania. It's all herbs, plus chiles, sugar snap peas, and tomatoes, and plus two flowers: scarlet flax and Canterbury bells. But they haven't arrived yet, and will need to germinate. If we were really planning ahead, we would have gotten the seeds awhile ago and started them all inside, but we weren't planning ahead, we were taking classes. :P

This is the full list that shipped to us:

BASIL, GENOVESE
BASIL, SWEET
BASIL, HOLY
CATNIP
CHIVES
CORIANDER / CILANTRO
DILL
EPAZOTE
LAVENDER, ENGLISH
OREGANO, GREEK
PARSLEY, DARK GREEN ITALIAN
ROSEMARY
SAGE
SPEARMINT
TARRAGON, RUSSIAN
THYME, ENGLISH
ANAHEIM CHILI PEPPER (thanks for the suggestion chickyboo!)
HABANERO PEPPER
FRESNO CHILE PEPPER
SUGAR SNAP PEA
ITALIAN GIANT PASTE TOMATO
SCARLET FLAX
BELLFLOWER (Canterbury Bells)

I know you are wondering about the three kinds of basil. Ben picked most everything, and asked me to weed down the list (ha, ha), and explained to me that sweet basil is the standard that you buy in a grocery store, Genovese is spicier and makes great pesto (which I make a lot!), and holy basil is Thai basil, thus suitable for the Thai cooking we do. It sounded very reasonable to me to buy all three.

So no seeds here yet, but we got trowels and a cultivator (that being the official term for the garden claw thing... YOU know what I mean) and took this opportunity to pull weeds and aerate the soil. Things we found in the ground include but are not limited to: bricks, trash, burlap sacking, potting soil, lots of worms, morning glory roots, charcoal, a giant tree root, slugs, and this weird root that was gooey inside and really disgusting to pull up.

There are also plans to cover the fence with no ivy on it with either blackberries, climbing roses, or both.

Last week Ben sent a sample of the soil in our backyard to Penn State, where they do free soil tests for acidity, presence of phosphates, nitrogen, etc. The results came back telling us that our tiny backyard has great soil (like all of the east, I suppose) and we can grow whatever we want. Right now, despite last week's warm weather, on Thursday it started raining, on Friday there were ice pellets and then snow, and now everything is frozen over again. So definitely a few weeks before we plant. :P

The thing we most, most, most want to grow is herbs (basil, rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano, mint, parsley), so those will be present in abundance. We will almost certainly also grow tomatoes, because just a few tomatoes fresh off the vine are amazing and worth cultivating an entire plant for. But what else do you think we should have? We don't have a huge amount of space, and trees of any kind are out because of the time constant involved. Even though I really want a lemon tree. Which don't grow here.

But yeah, any ideas?

more flowers, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Ben got me flowers last weekend, which I love, and he got these specifically because they are of the type we would think about planting in our tiny backyard. We want to have an herb garden and some flowers, maybe climbing roses to cover the chainlink fence on one side. We'll keep the side that's covered with ivy and morning glories untouched, I think, except to try to prevent the morning glories from spreading and killing off stuff.

Life is really good right now. Classes are going well, but there's still time for Ben and I to hang out and do things together, and really enjoy our life. Oh yeah, and I went to my first physical therapy session last week for my knee. It was cool; the therapist was impressed with how much balance and strength I had for having been injured like I was, and gave me some exercises to do. I'll run for them this week and we can see whether I'm doing something wrong that makes my knee hurt if I run. But for now, low-impact strengthening has been approved, so I'm trying to build the strength some with swimming and elliptical trainers. The therapist claimed that my right knee did not in fact have looser ligaments than my left, but rather, that all my ligaments are loose and thus I am prone to injury. (Big surprise, since I'm double-jointed.)

Plans are brewing to meet Steph and Scott in NYC the weekend after my birthday, which I am really looking forward to. We're living by all these neat places which we haven't seen before! I hope we make the time to take advantage of this.