veralouie: thoughts, gardens, houses, people treats

what do you do when husband tells you to go to a coffee shop while he cleans the apartment?

you take the request seriously and do as he says.

woohoo! so now i can finally update my sorely neglected blog. poor veralouie. you have had to subsist on poorly drawn cartoons for nearly two weeks. why, you ask? work. it has drawn me in to the world of its demands and i've complied. on a great work note though, i officially, or unofficially "won" during my first court appearance. yippee! (that is not what i said in court when the "win" became clear... but it was what i was thinking).

okay, so let's get on with this posting!

purple, yellow, and green beans...

(ummm... ignore the cat in the background... we do not allow our cats to have such blatant control over our attempts at a cat-free table)

beatrices...

we have been getting some crazy rain and crazy sunny hot days. so our garden looks like an overgrown mess... in a good way? this picture doesn't do justice to the amount of growth that has occurred recently... which... i am sort of sad about. i mean, about 3 weeks ago, the garden was perfect. everything was in its place... you could walk down the rows without being swallowed up by overgrown cilantro and tomato plants, you could see the outlines of the beatrices... and now, it's difficult to walk through and it just looks messy... now i know that if i were a wise human being i would see this change in a good way... the continuing evolution of the plants... some sort of continuous circular life-cycle...but i'm not wise, so instead i see the garden in the shape of wave. it reached its prettiness peak and now it's just breaking.

i'm sure my satisfaction level will change when our tomatoes start turning red.

anywho, does anyone know what this plant is in front of the yellow painted tongues???

here is one of its leaves close-up. they all had these black markings on them.

i say had because greg finally pulled it out. i could have sworn it was something i'd planted, but he was convinced it was a weed. maybe i planted a weed? who knows?

this is not our corn. we didn't plant any corn, but i have to admit, although i've spent extensive time in illinois, ohio, indiana, michigan, and wisconsin, i don't think i've ever actually been this close to corn (aside from at the grocery store and the kitchen table)... i honestly couldn't have told you that this is how it grew... i mean i obviously know what corn fields look like, but i just sort of figured the corn grew up out of the top of the plant... and there are multiple ears on each plant! i would've told you there was one ear per plant. i was that ignorant!

these are not our tomatoes, but aren't they so fun?!

this is our tomato. eeek! has greg been sprinkling radiation on the plants when i'm not looking???

at least this potato doesn't have horns...

today we are recruiting these crazy people to help us dig up the rest.

moral dilemma... when a rabbit is in your great neighbors' plot... and the rabbit is just a cute little kid rabbit whose chompers are surely not large enough to do that much damage... do you tell him to go away? or do simply you watch him trollop about and enjoy himself?

guess what we chose?

here are a couple of photos from the troy gardens prairie area...

i don't think i'll complain about this being adjacent to our new condo...

and the fact that we can pick beautiful flowers whenever we choose from the farm...

and create art now and again!

this mosaic (a la this blog's authors) will be one side of a fencepost for the children's garden.

these are not our flowers... if anyone knows what they are called, please feel free to chime in in the comments section or an email...

if you would like to see the new condo (not ours, but a look-alike) scroll down... (it is obviously a ways from being complete, but it is getting there)

a view of the basement window. greg thought that with a system of mirrors we could make it appear as though one is looking out from ground level.