This week brought a bag of red potatoes, a large head of broccoli, two heads of ruffled lettuce, a gorgeous bunch of young carrots, three summer squash, traded my tomatoes for a nice bunch of beets, a bag of mixed greens, a bunch of kale, and five cucumbers!

WOW!!!  I’m going to try grilling the beets, as the salad turnips grilled were spectacular.

This is already week six out of eighteen – I can’t believe time goes by so quickly.

They took my breath away – these unruly, grasping plants that have grown out of dried, hard balls of pea. Now they have all reached the top of the trellises, and wave about looking for more to grab hold of. These are indeed growers, survivors – but not scary like the vine on the garage in Medford that knew exactly where to go next, just waiting to cover everything – the house, us, the cars – everything. These are climbing, grasping what they find and holding on, but still frail in their standing.

They surprised me again today, these peas, with pods – honest-to-goodness, recognizable, edible pea pods, extending out from the flower blossom in slow growth.

This week I received one cabbage, three garlic, a huge bunch of salad turnips, two heads of lettuce, four bunches of broccoli crowns, three squash, an organic loaf of Plentiful White Sourdough from Abigail’s Bakery and I traded my three tomatoes (Yuck – my mother’s not here this week, so no way….) and got a gorgeous bunch of beets with nice leafy greens.  Woo hoo.

and both of them have a thing for heavy machinery.

I admit, I love uncovering more of the gorgeous rock we are living on. My concern is with the gaping holes they leave when they run out of ledge, but still have rental time on the bulldozer… My other thought is, is this really what we want to highlight in the yard?

During an afternoon torrential downpour, about two weeks ago, my mother noticed something stuck on one of the hummingbird feeders. Turns out that a baby female hummer had gotten a wing and half of herself jammed in the space between the feeder and the ledge. My mother helped to get her unstuck, and we put her in a dish on top of the hot tub. Then the skies opened with violent rain, and I was afraid she’d drown in the dish.

After a quick google, I went in search of an eyedropper to try to feed her. I finally found a watercolor paintbrush whose handle is actually a chamber for water. I filled it with some Oriole nectar. When I went back out the tiny girl had fallen or jumped so that she was behind the hot tub, under the deck railing. I contorted myself so she could feed out of the tube, and to my great surprise, she did! It started slow, and she was shaking, but she did drink, and she did open her eyes, but she didn’t look old enough or strong enough to make it off the deck, never mind to fly on her own.

While this tiny bird drama unfolded, an adult male kept hovering about, and when not flying around, he sat on the bird feeder close by.

After she had eaten and moved her head away, I turned to kill a small wasp that had crept through the deck boards, possibly drawn to the nectar, but big enough to do damage to a bird not much bigger than a quarter.

As I stepped on the wasp, the little hummingbird flew straight up by my (astonished) face and into a tree right above the deck!

Fast forward to today, about two weeks later… I was outside photographing the gardens and was sitting on the deck steps with the camera and heard the familiar “whup whup whup” of a hummer going to the feeder. It was this small girl, and to my delight she stayed on the feeder for about five minutes, then moved to the forsythia bush where she stayed for another good while.

I have no way of knowing for sure, of course, whether this is my same girl – but I will think it was.

This yew was deathly ill, and the view from the back deck, the screen porch and the steps into the yard. Cris pulled it out and now it is my favorite spot in the yard.

There are white and purple Salvia in the back, with some asters and red dianthus in front of them. The floppy pink are more dianthus, and then there are purple, floppy daisy-like things in the front.

Big fuzzy bumblebees hang out at the Salvia and the big cocklebells (? see below). While I was planting there were three or four butterflies in the flowers too!

Cris worked hard getting gravel out of some of the rock garden beds, and putting good dirt in them. You can see the front gravel border, and the giant “bathtub” area – this is basically just rock, so he filled some of it with loam. The front gravel border now has lots of ajuga and black mulch that looks beautiful, and the ajuga should spread and flower next spring. This is a before, arial-shot taken from the deck:

Here is a shot from ground-level, showing the tops of the Salvia, Coreopsis and I-have-no-idea what the fairy-tale flowers are – cocklebells? I really don’t know and SOMEONE threw out all the tags… but I love them.

Our home is essentially set in a hole that was blown out of a big rock, so the garden space took a bit of planning.  It is a very small, raised bed with stacked stone walls.  I think it is beautiful.

It is very small because I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with too much blank space.

So the bed was built, loam delivered and spread, fertilizer mixed in… and seeds and vegetables bought.  My eyes were bigger than my bed, so now we have two beds…  The raised bed has two rows of pea seeds with optimistic trellises, four tomato plants cages, beets, six broccoli plants and two eggplant plants.

The old compost bed has been turned into a second garden – this has asparagus (I can’t imagine anything will come of these weird roots), brussels sprouts, pumpkins and zucchini.

By Monday night we were sunburned, cramped, pulled, sore, bug-bitten, but satisfied.

So all week we’ve been watering and watching and trying not to get overly hopeful (Brussels Sprouts!).

So the update as of this afternoon:  someone has eaten two eggplant plants and four broccoli plants down to stubs.

Small, 7-inches wide, comes in PINK (I know, I know….), boots in 15 seconds, and is dandy with the wireless. Woo hoo.

The 2GB (Yes, 2GB – if you want to save anything, get a real laptop or stock up on those handy-dandy SD cards from Woot!) runs about $249.00.

So I reason that a smart phone will put me back at least $249, and then a monthly data subscription on top of that would be about $300 annually. Right? So now, look how much I would SAVE….

And then I start pricing the 4GB – then the 8GB, so I’m up to $400 or so, but still no monthly subscription, and Verizon won’t be carrying the iPhone anytime soon – so this still sounds like pure genius. To my ears. No one else seems to grasp the beauty of the technology or the plan.

So, the stimulus check comes and lo and behold – Asus has just come out with a 20GB, with better screen resolution (no horizontal scrolling) at roughly the same size – fits in my Butler Bag. Look at the size of that screen, baby!

This new 900 model, with XP (which eats up 8GB out of the 20GB, so it’s actually 12GB) is $549.00.

Because, at heart, I really am a cheapskate, I spend two days trying to find the lowest price, shipping cost and promo codes – and who the heck has these babies in stock. Amazon is one to two months out. Buy.com: in-stock, $10 off and free shipping.

So I bite the bullet because I’m dizzy with the prospect of being able to surf the web at family gatherings and airports and coffee shops…. I go through Google check out to get my $10-off, I dutifully type in my CC secret code, and wait. And wait.

So I don’t receive any email confirmations – not from Google Checkout, nor from Buy.com. I wait three days, check my CC statement, and order again. Yes, someone should have stopped me right at the beginning of this paragraph. I was dizzy I tell you, dizzy with the prospect of tiny keys and wireless magic, 24 hours of web access, instead of my usual 12 to 18.

At some point I wise up and send an email explaining the lack of any info from Friday’s order (it is now Monday) and that I just ordered again. They find my order from Friday, actually call me (nice, but short-lived fuzzy feeling) and I cancel Monday’s order.

Status still says “Ships in 1 to 2 Days”. Whew. I don’t know how long I can wait- now it’s four days into first order, and they are just releasing it. (Wait. What? When did I get this stupid? There aren’t even any coffee shops around here…)

So – of course, after my order is released (?) I get an email that says it’s backordered. No time frame. Order status on website still says “To Warehouse – Will Ship in 1 to 2 Days.” Ummm – which is it? Uncharacteristically I hope that the web status is right and they are just silly gooses.

Buy.com are not just silly gooses:
Item #208017730 was delayed in fulfillment. We do not have an estimated shipping date at this time. However, confirmation will be sent via e-mail once your order is shipped.
Thank you for your patience. (Italics and irony, all mine.)