I have not taken you on a garden tour since early June, so let's do that again now. Things have changed quite a bit in just under a month! It is warm out, the plants didn't croak during last week's cold spell (down to 41°F at night), and things have been growing seemingly overnight.
I find it pretty amazing that I can live in a house with its own garden. Of course, we all know the green thumb in this family is not mine. I may document the garden, harvest, and freeze its produce, but I'm not allowed to touch the plants for any other reason, lest blight should fall upon them.
In the plot near the patio, we have carrots, snow peas, orange zucchini, and green beans. Lesson learned this year: Snow peas need trellises. We had no idea they grew to be so tall. Oops!
It is also hard to see the peas, so harvesting can be very time-consuming. They are mmmmm good! I see a lot of stir-fry in our future.
Here are the green beans, and at left, the orange zucchini plant that Benjamin transplanted a while back. No produce to be seen yet here.
The carrots are growing, but due to our ignorance about snow peas, they are very overshadowed now, sandwiched between the snow peas and the brick wall. Note to gardener: don't plant carrots behind snow peas next year.
In the plot up on the hill, we have tomatoes (I kind of liked them by the patio - made for easy harvesting just before lunch time), eggplants, zucchini, lettuce, and shallots.
We had our very first garden salad for lunch today with a head of lettuce much like this one. Nary a slug to be found, to my great relief. (And here I must confess that our garden, while home-grown, is not organic. I just can't have a garden without slug pellets.)
We may be overrun with zucchini this year. We JUST finished last year's crop, much of which we had frozen... and all of which came from only ONE zucchini plant. Frédéric planted three or four of these this year. Friends and neighbors, consider that your fair warning!
No eggplants yet, but a flower. And plenty of bees around to help out.
The tomatoes are coming along nicely.
And I have done practically nothing on the retaining wall lately, as you can see. I'm dreaming of days with both boys in school all day, when I just might be able to keep up a little better with work, housework, AND the yard.
What I love most about the garden is that Frédéric does all the hard work - preparing the ground, planting, weeding, watering... and I get to do the fun part: harvesting!
The boys are much less interested in the garden, and much more interested in this. Now that it's finally warm enough again, they dedicate their afternoons to shivering and squealing in the ice-cold well water of the swimming pool.
Now this is what I call a REAL American car. Hahahahaha. Apparently the requirements to get into the car show are pretty lax.
Frédéric was wondering if we could have displayed our Chrysler Neon if we still had it. Perhaps that would have gotten us in for free. Our other idea was to set up a photo opportunity -- "Get your picture taken with a REAL AMERICAN!" -- to pay for our tickets, but we weren't sure how to go about setting that up on short notice. Maybe next year.
You could buy all sorts of authentic American wares, like cowboy boots.
Or license plates.
Leather clothes, T-shirts, turquoise jewelry, pocketknives. Look at all those American flags! Who knew the French were so fond of all things American?! The next time you hear someone say that the French hate Americans, you just tell them about the hundreds of French people visiting the American Show in Fismes. Many were even wearing cowboy hats or other American-style clothes.
They had a World War II army camp set up.
And an Indian village.
And they had bands playing country music while we were there; complete with country line dancing.
All in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon. Frédéric's big gripe was that the food stands were selling things like Belgian waffles and French crêpes instead of American food. Not a funnel cake or snowcone to be found, and nary a hint of Dr Pepper... hm, perhaps we should help organize next year. Maybe Uncle Curtis can come set up a Coke/Dr Pepper concession for us.
Our lettuce is growing. Two of them have been eaten by worms... we're waiting to see if the rest will survive until we can eat them or not.
It turns out snap peas grow to be really tall. We didn't realize that. So my mother-in-law added some homegrown trellises for them to grow in and around so they don't just fall over.
Frédéric removed three more laurel bushes. (Witness the brown spots where there is no grass.) Only two more to go!
He also cleaned up under the non-carport, which took a lot of doing as it involved first dejunking, and then powerwashing it, so we could once again appreciate the RED bricks (who knew they weren't dirt-colored?).
And some of our calendula in the retaining wall.
He did not get in trouble for that - after all, Frédéric did plant them in the square that had been originally designated the kids' garden - but I did strongly encourage him to ask permission before transplanting anything else!
Benjamin still has a whole month left of preschool. They get more frequent and longer breaks during the year, but only two months for summer.
Noah and Benjamin both like to pick the pretty flowers from the yard for me. I could dream of a beautiful green manicured lawn... but then who would bring me flowers?
It got up to 81°F today (wow! We are melting!) so we did this:
And of course amid all of this activity, we've also been working as usual.
Whew! An update that long ought to hold you over for at least three weeks now, right?