But first, the photos.


These are lilies of the valley from Hannah’s garden in Philly. She brought them down for me to start my own bed. Lilies of the Valley are one of my favorite flowers. They will be planted in the side bed.

Red Hobbit columbine from my sister, Barbara (for my birthday). They are a beautiful two-tone color and will look nice with the other columbine that I am cultivating.

Here’s our garden on May 9, 2009. Four weeks after it was planted! See what it looked like only a month ago!
We’ve been eating lettuce for dinner salads for about 2 or 3 weeks. The zucchini has some flowers now. All the tomato plants are taller than the kids and have blossoms (and even a few green tomatoes). The broccoli is beginning to form a head, but something else is eating its leaves. The sugar snap peas are grabbing onto the trellis that we made of twigs.

We put the mint in a large galvanized bucket so that we could contain its invasive habits. In the middle of the three varieties of mint we have a pepper plant.

We grew some sunflowers from seed and they are starting to come up near the shed.

Here are two of our three rainbarrels that we hope to use to water the gardens with during the hot, dry summer. Durham encourages residents to use rainbarrels, which is the exact opposite of what happened to this one poor farmer in Colorado.

I always thought Tulip Trees were so named because of the shape of their leaves. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I was wrong when I walked outside and saw this sight in our neighbor’s yard.

In addition to gardening, yard maintenance, and general household chores, I’ve been swimming at a local indoor pool (and have even started working out with a Masters’ team… which includes anyone older than 18). Ethan, Maggie, and Ruby have all been to the pool with me (Ruby is a natural fish and loves the water). We’ve discovered LocoPops, Parker & Otis, the Durham Farmers’ Market, and some local color. In fact, we will soon need to find some black and hot pink for Mark.

We do “work” too (maybe that should be “work for money”, since I certainly have been “working” quite a bit outdoors). I just finished teaching another semester of a distance learning course for UVA. And I’m also writing, researching, writing, researching, and more writing… but as you may have noticed, not writing so many blog posts. I’ve got other deadlines looming, so please forgive the dearth of posts here. I guess you could say I’m living life more than documenting it right now. I’m also doing a lot of private thinking which will eventually (hopefully) be cogent enough for public. So, I’m saving up ideas and memories for the future. Stay tuned.