Last weekend was the first in about three weeks where we did not have grey, dreary rain all weekend, so it was a whirlwind of outdoor projects.

(Seriously, the weekdays – when we are stuck in the office staring out the window at the lovely weather  – have been gorgeous, and the weekends – when we are supposed to be enjoying our lives – have been miserable.  No fair.)

The vegetable garden is now planted.  If all goes well (and we hope that it does) we will have more vegetables than we can eat in a month or so.

We have:

• 24 tomato plants:
  • 4 Black Prince
  • 4 Lemon Boy
  • 4 Phoenix (heat resistant variety – which will be useful if this summer is as hot as the last one was)
  • 4 Sweet 100s cherry tomatoes
  • 4 Roma (for sauce mostly)
  • 4 Mr Stripey
• 3 eggplants (2 purple and 1 white)
• 3 sweet green peppers
• 3 mucho nacho jalapeno peppers
• 3 ancho chili peppers (started from seeds, and honestly not looking like they will survive)
• 2 greek oregano
• 3 sage
• 3 basil
• rosemary (left over from last year and still doing quite well)
• 3 bush beans (started from seeds, 2 are doing well, and one looks like it is slowly dying)
• 4 zucchini (3 in pots on the deck, and 1 at the corner of the house)
• 6 sugar snap peas (planted next to the deck and provided with a string trellis so that they have something to climb)

We ended up with fewer eggplants and more zucchini than we intended because I grabbed a flat marked “eggplant” at the Meijer’s Garden Store without actually checking that all of the plants on it were in fact eggplants.  Oops.  But at least we like zucchini.

Since we have planted in this patch for several years now, and since at the end of the growing season we just turn the dead plants into the soil and cover the whole thing with burlap for the winder, we have a lot of what we call “volunteers”… things that we did not plant this year, but nonetheless plan on nurturing.  We have no less than 5 volunteer tomatoes, which will hopefully survive long enough to bear fruit so that we can see what variety they are.  We also have several volunteer basil and sage plants.

The blackberry and raspberry vines along the side of the house are spreading faster than ever.  I hope that this year I will be able to at least make one pie, or at least a small tart, with the berries.  My primary competition for which will be all of the neighborhood birds.

We even (mostly) finished the work on the front bed around the new Japanese Cherry.  The soil has been turned over several times (and many, many roots from the crabapple have been discovered and removed), topsoil has been added, daisy seeds of several varieties have been scattered around the tree, and other new plants have been added.  Most of those new plants are hostas, as we have been planting, transplanting, and replanting a lot of hostas this spring.  Hostas are just amazingly hardy and versatile.  Their only drawback is that they die back to the root ball and regrow completely every year, so there will always be that span of time over winter and into early spring where the flowerbeds are completely barren and empty.

We also planted three rosebushes at the corner of the house.  We have fewer deer wandering through our yard here then my parents do up in Cleveland, so they may survive, and even (hopefully) thrive.

Despite the fact that nothing (other than the pea plants) have visibly grown since we planted them, there are already flowers on a couple of the tomato plants and one of the green peppers, and buds on all of the roses.

Another year older yesterday.

We went out to dinner (at The Pine Club) the night before since the actual day I had to spend down in Cincinnati for non-reschedule-able work reasons, and there was some uncertainty over when I would actually make it home that evening.

So last night after I finally got home I had leftover bone-in ribeye steak, guacamole and tortilla chips, some fresh bread, and a bottle (shared with John) of my brother Jeff’s (very delicious) wine.  A dinner of whatever then heck I could scrounge out of the kitchen because I sure didn’t feel like cooking, and John needed to kitchen for bread-making and coating the cheese with wax anyway.

(More on the cheese later…)

It was an odd birthday, and I didn’t get to take the day off as I like to do, but an oddly satisfying one nevertheless.