Phoning it in, so to speak.

I took a lot of pictures this week. To begin with, here are some photos of the ants I checked out on Monday--I rode my bicycle out to east Mesa, and this is what I found. I'm not sure if these colonies will be all that helpful in the long run, because it was hard to tell if the population density was high enough to make it feasible to locate mating swarms. But it made for a good bike ride, and the guy who notified me about the colonies said that we might be able to dig them up.

As the pictures indicate, these ants are pretty cryptic--they move at a leisurely pace, which helps them blend in to their background. The ants carrying leaves are much more obvious, though, especially if you are watching them move.

( clicky for pictures... )

Phoning it in, 2: Pizza-party and Scrabble Society

And now I bring you various photographs from the Scrabble Society and from pizza-making with K. All of the pictures of food are making me hungry! Last night, we got to try out some miracle fruits, courtesy of D. Those are fruits that make sour foods no longer taste sour. The most remarkable flavor changes for me included white wine and tomatoes. Suddenly, perfectly decent tomatoes tasted..strange...

After the miracle fruit-fest, we finished decorating some Lemon Poppyseed Butterfly Cupcakes, and ate those as well. The lemon curd whipped cream filling was excellent, though the entire process might have been slightly more of a pain in the ass than it was worth.

( delicious foods and friends )

Phoning it in, 3: Gardening, the early stages

I'm about to get really really obsessed with gardening, now that we've finally got some stuff in the ground and now that I've finally built a plant shelf. The photos at the end are mostly for reference so I'll have something to compare against later in the year. Lots of promise, not a lot of vegetation (yet).

I was telling K on Sunday about how I keep on reading these things about chefs who have started up kitchen gardens to supply their restaurants. Most of the stories talk about how aforementioned chefs simply have to throw a bunch of seeds in the ground, and then an incredible bounty of food pops up. Easier than expected; miraculous, almost. The story made K shake her fist in the air; her family has been gardening in the desert for years, and it's not such a simple matter here.

This is really my first year of gardening, ever. I've had a plant here and there, but I've never undertaken a whole vegetable garden. I hope that at least one edible thing comes out of the entire undertaking, and I'm incredibly grateful for all of the people who have been helping out already, in so many different ways. I think there are going to be some parallels with my experiences with bicycling here--it's something that's best accomplished with the help of a community.

I'd been thinking for a while about turning our back yard into a community gardening space, but I'm starting to think that maybe I was envisioning it in the wrong way. My initial thought was to set things up like a Community P-patch, where different people have different space to use however they see fit. But I don't think that will work for our space. Someone has to water everything, and setting up rules for a P-patch seems too complicated for an organizational staff of just one volunteer.

Instead, I think it's going to be a community garden from the standpoint that different people can contribute whatever they want to contribute (whether it's compost, seeds, help digging, help eating, or help planning), and the benefits will be shared in the same way (benefits of being outside, of spending time with friends, of eating delicious vegetables, of getting in touch with the soil and seasons).

Yes, this could work.

( gardening, the early stages )