This one's for Brian

That's not a carrot.

THIS is a carrot.

....  [insert witty comment here, I'm at a loss]

I'd never seen this before, but since I took that picture I've found another pair of conjoined tomato-twins on my Sungold plant.  Nature is fun.

Late summer, 2012

Okay, here is the late summer photographic round-up I promised.

 We took the kids to the zoo.  This bear was in front of the gift shop, which had a special kid-sized door next to the adult-sized one.  :-)

 I love our front porch even more, now that we've acquired a glider bench for it.  If only I had the time to actually sit on it.

In late August, I took the kids down to Grandma and Grandpa Kluge's for a short visit, the main purpose of which was to spend time in the river and on our island, just like Daniel and I did when we were kids.  Conveniently, Daniel was still home on vacation while we visited.  

 Walking through our field towards the best path down to the river

 Our neighbors (who own the other part of the island) kindly allow us to use their spiffy gangway...

 ...and their even spiffier wooden bridge.  They take it up in the fall when the water begins to rise, and replace it in the summer.  It's a big improvement -- when we were kids we had to wade out to the island.

 Uncle Daniel helping Eve practice floating

 Samuel, getting into the splash of things

 The South Fork of the Yamhill River, with Eve for perspective

Hops, growing decoratively over my parents' dining room window.

Bail, bail!

This is a very short post to explain the chief reason why I haven't posted anything in over a month.  See on the calendar there?  That big blank no-posting period was the second half of July and most of the month of August.  As any gardener will tell you, that's harvest time.  As joyful as it is, I often find that harvesting and finding uses for my veggies takes on a tone of subdued panic, much like bailing out a leaky boat.  I'm not harvesting because I want to, I'm harvesting because I have to or the beans will get overripe and the basil will bolt and the cucumbers will turn old and bitter and in any case I'm harvesting because if I don't, I'll have twice as much to harvest tomorrow!

 This was a typical green bean harvest.  Every other day for about two weeks.  Gah!

This was back in July when my garden looked nice and tidy.  Now all the plants have grown so big, there's scarcely any room to step between them.

I'm still in the thick of it, actually.  Today I made an all-from-my-garden batch of salsa, a batch of blackberry freezer jam, a batch of kale chips, and I roasted and froze about 6 lbs of cherry tomatoes.  *whimper*  I want to lie down.  But soon I'll be back with more pictures of our summer doings.

Oh no, not again

"Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now."  -Douglas Adams, HGttG

Anyone remember this? 

Yes.  Well. 

It wasn't the the pansies this time, or at least not at first.  It was the nasturtiums. 

I should explain at this juncture that Isaiah and I have been having a lot of conflict recently.  Things just seem to be going wrong for him lately, and of course the main person who points out his errors in judgement is me.  Previously, he would simply get upset and cry, but now he appears to have a new method of conflict management:  don't get mad, get even.

Yesterday the kids and I were outside.  Isaiah wanted to help me weed, so I set him to the task of following me around and putting the weeds I dug up into the bucket.  He wasn't terribly focused, and ended up being put in timeout for some thing or other.  When I released him from timeout he wandered off out of sight and I enjoyed what should have been an ominously quiet fifteen minutes.  At the end of that time he approached me with a small plant in his hand, saying "Mommy, I just thought this was a weed...".  It was a nasturtium.  I suddenly realized that the place he'd disappeared to was the narrow bed on the front corner of our property where I had been babying a dozen or so struggling nasturtiums.  They had just started to bloom that week.  I ran around front and there they were, all the nasturtiums pulled up by the roots.  I said blankly "Isaiah, you just pulled up all my flowers."  Without a word he turned and ran to the timeout place, and put himself in timeout. 

He has insisted that he thought the flowers were weeds.  Aside from the fact that I had specifically told him not to pull up any weeds except grass, I find this extremely difficult to believe.  He may only be four, but he's been around me and my garden for a while.  The nasturtiums were alone in that bed, except for a bit of invading grass.  They had blooms on them.  It should have been obvious.

And then today, while trying ineffectually to help me herd Samuel back inside, he accidentally crushed one of my delphinium plants.  I yelped at him, and a few moments later I caught sight of him taking a running jump onto one of my pansy plants.  A. Running. Jump.  Which he then denied with the increasingly suspect line: "I thought it was a weed." 

I'm completely at a loss as to how to deal with this.  I know why he's doing what he's doing, but I'm so taken aback by it that I have no ready response.  I very much hope this is a phase, and not an indicator of things to come.  In the meantime, I'm going to have to keep a close eye on him while he's outside.

Fourth of July

The only thing tying this next series of photos together is that they all were taken on or near the Fourth of July.

I believe this is the first time I've ever bought the kids matching shirts.  It seemed as good a time as any.

 This is as good a posed shot as we could get.

 Yep, them'r my kids.

Two days later, we were eating breakfast and Isaiah began shrieking and pointing out the window, babbling about a parachute.  I looked out across our back yard and saw this:

 I'm pretty sure this same balloon flies over our house once a year, in the summer.  It's a thrill every time.

 They were close enough that we could see the flame and hear the roar of the burner.  Eve insists she saw the people in the basket waving at us.

 My slightly belated Mother's Day present.  Now to plan the Mary garden!

Orange calla in front of lavender.  And a random solar light I was too lazy to move out of the picture.

Catching up

 After the aforementioned computer difficulties, we are back in action but behind on posting.  As is my wont, I'll just start throwing pictures out there willy-nilly in an attempt to get caught up.

 This Oridono Nishiki japanese maple is one of very few trees on our property that I can take credit for.  The new foliage comes in pink before changing to variegated cream/green.

 Isaiah is a remarkably good trench-digger.

 He has good form and everything.

 Eve and Samuel doing their own shovel-work.

 Eve in front of the perennial sweet peas.  The garden fence is bowed down under the sheer biomass of these botanical freaks.  Why do half the things I plant grow to at least double the size I anticipated?  I don't want to complain, but it can be awkward sometimes.

 That's determination, that is.

 He asked if he could take his nap there.  Daddy said OK, not actually expecting it to work.

Technical difficulties... please stand by

I've been meaning to put up a post, or three, for the past two weeks or so, but I've been held back by the demise (again) of the only computer in the house that has adequate photo editing software on it.  I think the computer is back in action now, but it'll probably take me another week to download, sort, select, edit, and upload the pictures, so for now I give you a photo-free post.

Hm, what can I write about that I don't want to show pictures of later...  Well, I defrosted our chest freezer for the first time today.  Go me. 

I have now positively identified two species of hummingbirds that frequent our yard and feeder; previously, I thought we only had one. 

My vegetable garden is coming along nicely in spite of what one radio host referred to as "Portland's bi-polar spring weather".  For those of you outside of the Pacific NW, yes, it is still spring.  Regardless of what the calendar says, summer does not begin around here until July 5.  Ask anyone from these parts, they'll say the same.

Eve is out of school, and into swimming lessons.  She enjoys them, but it's not coming naturally to her.  I'm pretty sure she finished last in her class, actually.  Ah well. I wasn't good at it initially either.  I expect she'll catch on before long.  

Speaking of catching on, it occurred to me a few days ago that it was really high time we took the training wheels off Eve's bike.  We probably would have done this a year or two ago, but we plumb forgot.  Yesterday I rectified this, put a helmet on the girl, and walked beside her with a guiding hand on her shoulder.  After about 10 minutes of this we stopped so I could chat with our neighbor.  Eve must have gotten bored waiting, because shortly after that I glanced up to see Eve riding by, BY HERSELF, saying "Mommy! Look at me!". 

*blink, blink*

Well that was easy.  Now we have to find her a bigger bike.