May 2009: Things are still lush.

As I'm writing this (in August), it seems bizarre to think this green and fertile-seeming backyard, especially with the living room windows cracked in the middle of a sunny day, is in the same region of the country as the place I currently live, scorched pale yellow and dusty.

Some more pictures of the herb bed, slightly more mature here, including some herbs flowering:

A couple require special attention. First is borage. It's great flowers are edible and supposedly have a cucumber flavor. I read they make for a great garnish to the vaunted GT.

Then there's basil, which has these scale-y seeds that develop from its flowers.

As much as I love cilantro (it's up there with cheese in its supernatural ability to make almost everything taste better), I didn't take much advantage of my cilantro plants while they were still alive this summer. It still baffles me how I let that opportunity slip by. So when they went to seed and eventually dried up, I was determined to at least take advantage of the ("coriander") seeds. Picking the seeds from the chaff was more than a little time consuming, but I got quite a lot out of one plant . . .

I'm not sure I've mentioned it yet, but this season I tried a more dense planting strategy. In this case, I planted corn between the rows of potatoes. Here's a picture of the potatoes by themselves.

And then a few pictures of the corn.

Hordes of these colorful bugs took a liking to the turnips:

Between filling out the vegetable beds, supplementing the herb bed, and building up some ornamental beds elsewhere, I was almost out of compost from our yard waste pile. Here's a couple profiles:

And I went ahead and started some seedlings for the fall garden -- a few months in advance, hoping they'd be nice and big when I put them out to the late summer sun.