Ummm…tomatoes.




Ray and I started a garden in the spring. I would say that it has done remarkably well, but my main source of comparison is the basil I tried to grow in the window sill at Block 2, so really I don’t have a very broad personal perspective on this sort of thing. Our neighbors also have a garden, and it’s about twice the size of ours. Because of this, at the beginning of the spring, I considered our garden small. Then I realized that most people living around us don’t have gardens at all, so now I brag to my family and coworkers that Ray and I have one of the largest gardens in the neighborhood.

There are at least two things that I have been especially surprised by. One is the power of seeds. The other is cuttings. At first everything we planted came from a nearby nursery and was already a few inches tall. I didn’t have too much trouble believing that those plants would grow since they already looked like they were making good progress. Our neighbor had squash and zucchini seeds out one day and offered some to us. He told me how to plant them – build a small mound, make an indention, drop a few in, and cover them up. That seemed too simple to work, but I humored him and tried it. And holy smokes, in a few weeks we had squash and zucchini plants so big that they were hanging out of the garden and had to be carefully mowed around. The cuttings are pretty remarkable, too, and again this is something I first learned about from the same neighbor. It is possible to snip off a few inches of plant, put it in a glass of shallow water, have it grow roots, replant it, and have it survive as a totally new plant. Pretty sweet. Obviously, from a book-sense standpoint, I knew that seeds would grow, but I didn’t know a thing about cuttings. There is so much to learn from just living in a house with a yard. (And so much to buy, but that’s a different story…)

I am an architect.

Many of you may have been under the impression that I was already an architect before last week, but unfortunately that was not the case. (Actually, I don’t know how anyone could have been under that impression because I had constantly been telling people that I was not a licensed architect – that I was taking the exams and that I could not legally call myself an architect. Still, people kept introducing and referring to me as an architect. This mess is one of the reasons why I am so pleased to report that I passed all of my exams and am now licensed as an individual in the state of Arkansas.)

I have finally broken my (unintentional) year-long blogging silence, though if no one reads this anymore, I don’t suppose that matters much. Kind of like the tree falling in the empty forest question. Kind of like a lot of blogs, I suppose.