A garden retrospective!

In March, we expanded our garden by about 50%. This picture is from March 19, and you can see the rhubarb poking up!



On April 16, the strawberry plants were clearly returning.



On May 23 (isn't that an important day for some reason? Claire, can you remind me?), the collards and rhubarb appear thrilled to be alive, and there's some beautiful lettuce in the back.



On June 13, we could hardly believe how far the garden had come. Parsnips (close) and tomatoes (far) had added their voices to the fray.



By July 1, the tomatoes had been belatedly staked and corn was coming up in the back.



By July 21, we had a forest. (With a valley in the middle where our piddly peppers took their time....)



On August 7, we found the corn had been taking some sort of growth hormone.



By September 15, we'd taken down the corn, and many of our tomato plants had died of blight. (I guess the darkness of the picture symbolizes this sad news.)



Somehow I seem to have missed taking a picture in October. I guess life must have gotten pretty busy, and I know the garden slowed down, but we were getting a lot of delicious raspberries!

Yesterday--November 17--I took this picture showing the beautiful fallen-leaf mulch our garden has acquired. We've had several hard frosts, so all the tomatoes and the peppers are dead; the raspberries are for some reason still putting out berries, but they're hard and not flavorful; but somehow the seeds of our earlier lettuce plants are still growing, and the leeks and parsnips await further frosts to improve their flavor before harvesting.



And now, the moment I'm sure you've been waiting for! Our official Tomato Tally for the season is... 135! And our Peppers Picked... 38 delicious, delicious peppers. Not bad considering the drought, the blight, etc....

Now, we have to hope that we don't get jobs for next year, because we'd have to move, and learn all our gardening lessons all over again in a new place!

The end of the semester is shaping up to be rather intense, as a number of things are going on simultaneously. I got a steroid shot in my wrist a week ago, and though it's not clear yet if it's helping, I'm going back to the doctor in December to talk it over. I gave a talk at the national theory conference, which was rather exciting. Then, when I had recovered from the conference, a draft of my dissertation proposal came together remarkably quickly, and I've been working on it pretty intensively and corresponding with my committee members so that I can defend the proposal yet this semester. (Assuming all goes well and I do successfully defend it, it'll be a huge load off my mind when I leave for Christmas Break, which would be great!) And finally, I applied for a job and, two days ago, found out they're flying me out for an interview! It's a job that centers around aural skills teaching, so the teaching part of my interview is rather stressful to think about--aural skills teaching is so dependent on the class's abilities and personalities. But it'll be exciting nonetheless.

And perhaps most important of all, yesterday, Sara stumbled across the recipe to the most delicious cheesy breads/rolls I've ever had, which just happen to be naturally gluten-free. Chenette and Bakker families, be forewarned that you will need tapioca starch when we visit next....