weather, watermelon, white wing

(thanks to grandma kathy for the terrific photo!)

it has been two weeks since i've updated! i think i need to update more like everyday, otherwise this space for a new post becomes too blank, too white, too big... a.k.a. daunting. well, that's a little dramatic, but if it's only going to be a bi-weekly event, then it does become more of an event to orchestrate.

i guess i will start with the weather-- an easy topic. the weather this summer has been great, in my opinion. last night greg and i sat out on our porch for about 20 minutes and the temperature was perfect in the warm, but not too warm, and cool, but not too cool, sense, and the best part was that we encountered not one mosquito, even after i mentioned it, which usually would have jinxed the situation. right now the computer tells me it's 79, though it feels cooler than that to me. it's breezy and overcast and very pleasant. in general it has been a cool and dry summer. i think my only suggestion would be a few more big storms, but maybe it would need to be consistently hotter to get those. until today, we have had a couple of hot weeks. aside from sleeping, and sweating it out last sunday in my office with a broken air conditioner, the heat hasn't been too bad either. perhaps it will yield us some tomatoes in our garden. we've had exactly one red tomato, although we are sure there have been one or two others nearing red that suddenly disappeared. today william and i went out to the garden and were saddened to see that our biggest little pumpkin had mysteriously disappeared too. the pumpkin plants are reaching to claim all four corners of our plot, so i'm sure there will be others, but still, i was looking forward to watching that particular one grow. we have also recently planted lettuce, carrots, and green beans. we're not sure if we'll get any green beans before fall, but we're trying late anyway. they're taking off despite the fact that we are not good at watering our plot. however, just this week, william learned all about watering the garden, so i think he will ensure that it gets plenty of water. before last week, we'd go out there and eat basil and look for tomatoes and pull an occasional onion, but last week, he found the watering cans in the shed, so we filled up a couple and watered the plants and he has been quite happy with the task.

yesterday i went to savers and got william "new" snowpants for winter, "new" tennis shoes for when his feet get bigger, and a whole "new" library of board books, which was maybe a silly thing to do, but they are so cheap and he likes them, so that's what i did. we also went to the big farmer's market yesterday. i had only been there once this season, greg and william not at all. we supplemented our csa produce with a yellow watermelon, a few more tomatoes, a few more carrots, some corn on the cob (one of w.t.'s favorites), and a sweet onion. we got some white sweet onions in our csa share a couple of weeks ago and they were out of this world delicious. i was putting them on everything, i kept talking about how good they were and when i wasn't eating or talking about them, i was thinking about them. the variety is called 'white wing.' it was a new variety for the farm. at the farmer's market, we saw a variety called 'candy' which sounded good, right? so we bought one and took it home and put it on our sandwhiches and it did not compare at all... just not even close. and it was not like eating candy either... it was just like eating an onion, but not an obsessively good onion. next year, we are growing white wing, and i recommend that you do too!