Green weekend

"Some weekends are grey, some weekends are mean, this one had plants, and so was green."  

Coffeeboy and I spent this past weekend getting the garden, in various permutations, going. When we moved here, we didn't think we'd garden much. After all, we don't own the land outside our condo, but we figured we could put in a few plants, just a few. Then the college where Coffeeboy works started a community garden and we got a 4x20 plot of land to use. Now it looks like we'll be gardening more food than ever!

First, of course, was the very exciting Asheville Herb Festival. We'd had a poster on our fridge about this for the past month, and knew we wanted to go there to stock up on our favorite flavorings. I was hoping to score some soap and maybe some interesting lavendar products, but we ended up with only an hour at the festival, barely enough time to scope out the growing (as opposed to turned-into-products) herbs we wanted.

As you can see, we had quite a loot! In addition to chives and lemon thyme which we picked up at a small local plant sale, at the herb festival we found, as you can see above, plenty more to flavor our lives with. 

The festival itself was tons of fun, with dozens of herb vendors, colorful signs, and interesting varieties.  After the festival, Coffeboy and I headed to Asheville where we had a beer at Jack of the Wood Pub followed by a lovely dinner at the all-vegetarian/vegan restaurant The Laughing Seed.  Of course, it wouldn't be a spring night in Asheville without a drumming session going on in Pritchard Circle, so we stopped to watch young hippies and old hippies groovin' together to what's always a really amazing impromptu performance, and of course, to watch the tourists watching the action, too. I didn't have my camera then, so I couldn't take pictures (oh well!). 

Saturday afternoon we planted the herbs in their containers: 

In order from the back, the plants are: 

Back row: chocolate mint, placeholder plant, spearmint

Middle row: chamomile, a petunia, lemon balm

Front row: thyme, sage, oregano, lemon thyme

Round container on left: lavendar

Middle round container: cilantro, parsley

Round container on right: regular basil, cinnamon/Thai basil, chives

We'd decided to plant the herbs in containers so as to have more room in the ground for vegetables - and because I liked the idea of framing our little back patio area with herbs. This, to me, seemed like just the thing to do with such a little patio: make it smell really, really, great, and be useful, too!

Yesterday, we planted our veggie garden. We put in several varieties of tomatoes, saving two for the community garden and planting five by our house, to the right of the air conditioning unit. To the left, we planted four peppers, green and purple bell, and left of that, four Japanese eggplants. As you can see, there's still a lot of room to grow where the black anti-weed cover is. We're going to put in beets, spinach, and parsnips there, and also some of those over at the college garden.

(You can see the plants better in the bigger images at Flickr!)

Finally, just because they're cute, pictures of the cats: Juniper (the Sock-Lord, apparently, who loves handknit socks as well as her daddy's smelly, just-gardened-in socks as well) and Magellan (curled up on my desk chair):

In the next post, I promise I'll have some fibery goodness - a finished object, and a new sweater-in-progress made of the to-die-for Malabrigo!