The early birds.

The tomatoes are coming.

High Park, I love you too.

Burrata, I love you.

 

Snippity-snaps from Rebecca & Jaimes’s big big day.

(My first) Pimm’s in the Park.

Stormwatching.

Peppers!

Watching for my next move.

Carbo Girl, the Gardener.

I love fries.  A lot.  A friend once said if I was a superhero, I’d be Carbo Girl.  Fighting crime and shooting fries from my fingertips.

Which, if you think about it, could be dangerous ’cause I’d end up eating them all the time.

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This is only our second year of gardening and we’re still working it out.  Tried different things, changed it up from last year.

Of all the carrots we planted, only one row survived (we suffocated the rest) and of all the fennel, only one has appeared.  It stands alone in its slice of soil, the solitary soldier.

This may lead you to believe that our success rate isn’t so great.

Don’t worry, we think the same thing.

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We have new next-door neighbours, who’ve been renovating for the last 5 months.  They have a garden way bigger than ours and, when they moved in, I worried they’d pave over it or something.  When they cut down the 30+ year old grapevine, it seemed possible.

As it turns out, even though they aren’t even living there yet, they’re the kind of people who don’t let anything go to waste.  Their garden is lush and bountiful — and even (dare I say) efficient.  Stakes and strings hoist it up and there’s solid greenery all the way up to eye-level.

It makes our own garden look lazy.  The lone fennel and empty patch of weeds where the carrots would’ve been confirm it.

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I feel a bit bad about this, to be honest.  I know we’re still learning.  Mistakes along the way are inevitable.

So when we experience even a little bit of success, it is thrilling.

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We also tried our hand at growing potatoes this year.  I was a bit daunted but people said it’d be easy.

“Easy” for me is plopping it in the ground, sometimes watering it and then — poof — it grows.  That’s easy.

The instructions on the bag read something about “hilling up” the soil, once at a certain point and then again at another point.  Apparently if the potatoes turn green, they become poisonous or something like that.

It didn’t sound easy.

And of course, we didn’t do the hilling thing right away.  We only did it after we’d read that green poisonous thing, many weeks later, in a bookstore that we were randomly browsing in.

Whoops.

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Another book said that the potatoes would be ready once the plant starts to die.

And one of the plants was starting to die.

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Of course, knowing our success rate, it was hard to know which way this was going to go.

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Luckily, thankfully, blessedly — it was good.

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There they are, our very first-ever homegrown German Butterball potatoes!

We sliced them up into fries, baked ’em in the oven and devoured them all in one sitting.

Carbo Girl strikes again and, goshdarnit, if they weren’t the best freaking fries she’d ever had.

Jeans, running.

Last week, I was lucky enough to be shooting at our great friend Janna’s horse farm.  A beautiful place that’s all rolling hills and open fields and big sky.

And to see the joy on her dogs’ faces as they would run and run and run all over the place.  Leaping through tall grass, weeds whipping their faces.  Tongues flung and flying by the wayside.

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Jeans doesn’t have many opportunities to experience such freedom.

Our yard isn’t properly fenced and we live on a busy street.  Our house is an old Victorian row house with intimate rooms and narrow hallways.  By the time she picks up any real speed, she has to put on the brakes.

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There’s a school yard just a block from our place.  The sign on the fence reads no dogs allowed but we see dogs there sometimes.  I think it’s more about keeping the grass clean for the kids to roll around in.  Makes sense.

But today the field was empty and we both know how much she loves to run.

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So.  We let her run.

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