Produce!

Ta-da! Our very first garden produce!

...okay, it's just thinnings. Our first attempt at growing basil from seed yielded absolutely nothing, so the second time round I planted a bit heavily (read: dumped seeds in a pretty much solid line). So this week I got to do some thinning, and just look at the gorgeous little leaves we got!

I know it's a bit silly, but this is the first thing we've gotten to eat from our garden. So I mixed some into our beans and rice and put some in a green salad and put some on our roast today and felt very proud.

Here's a full-on view of our garden.

You can see that it's on a bit of a hill, and has been terraced (with those really attractive logs. Which at some point we would like to replace with truly attractive rocks or bricks. Or even ugly rocks or bricks, since they'd probably beat this. If we can't find some bricks, we'll try to get a second-hand deer head to mount on the fence off to the side, you know, to complete the ambiance). We've obviously only done anything really on the left side; the right is the "before" picture that shows you what the whole garden looked like, approximately, when we got it.
This sweet little lemon tree is at the top left of the garden. It was a dry stick when we got the garden, so I'm very proud of the leaves and sprigs that have grown now. (In fact, yesterday, our very first blossom opened--there will be fruit!)


Our garden also has this great big jade plant off to one side. Unfortunately, one major branch of it has sort of collapsed, seriously invading one of our garden plots in an unsightly way, as you can see. I think we're going to look into cutting it off--but we need to make sure we know what to do to the wound when we do so we don't expose the plant to disease.

I'm so excited about our garden! I told my mother, "I think I'm obsessed." She laughed at me and said that whenever I get into anything I do it so hard you could call it obsession. Apparently she's noticed a pattern.

Here's Casey waiting semi-patiently while I putter about in the garden. (Those aren't my greens in the background. My garden-neighbor is a fabulous green thumb.)