The green stuff

I'm a gardening nut. I love plants. It's hereditary - blame all the females in my family. My Papa claims that Nana is not happy unless she can go out and work in the yard almost every day. I still remember my mom waking me up at 6 a.m. on Saturdays (with difficulty) to help her move rocks, dig up bulbs, plant strawberry starts from last year. My college roomates thought I was nuts because I liked mowing the yard of our rented house, planting geraniums in pots on the patio, and trimming the front bushes. And I still vividly remember my great-granmother's garden, and the frogs that hid in the back.

Since moving to Reno, I've wanted to learn more about the Great Basin and its natural history - the names of mountain ranges, what plants and animals live here and where to find them at various times of year. When I finished school I finally had time to put some of that knowledge to use and I began to plant native flowers and bushes (or at least similar species) in our yard. The side benefit was that this made it easier to help Mike i.d. plants out at his field site. In spite of this, at the end of the season I would inevitably hear Mike joking in the kitchen, "So where's all my vegetables? Didn't you grow me anything I can eat?" (Have I mentioned how much Mike likes to razz me?)

Mike likes my plants, or at least he likes how happy they make me. But he's a practical and efficient guy. Growing things makes me happy. Eating makes him happy. Why not combine the two? Well, now that we're not both tromping through the Nevada desert for more than half the summer and relying on our neighbors to make sure that everything in our yard isn't brown and dead when we return, I thought we'd try it.

So, I coerced Mike into helping me out and here are the results.

In addition to the tomatoes I have in pots, we also have Hungarian peppers, jalapeno peppers, golden bell peppers, red cabbage, cucumbers, and gourds.

And here are the herbs I planted earlier in the year, and a few perennial herbs that came back in force. They've taken off! Last week I trimmed them back and the harvest was so huge I had a whole armful of oregano and thyme.

I figured I would share the surplus with the softabll team since several of them had said they would like some fresh herbs. But I forgot to bring the oregano and thyme to the game, so when we got to Bully's afterward for a drink I brought the bag in with me. By this time it was almost 10 p.m., and I guess I wasn't thinking because the looks I got from the waitress as I was handing out bags of green stuff were priceless.