Case in point:

This is what summer looks like.

The tomatoes went in the ground on June 11. A full eleven weeks after they were sown. Oops. By that time their legs went alllll the way up. For each plant, I pulled aside the mulch, tucked the Jiffy-Pellet-turned-elaborate-root-ball into a hole dug as deep as the soil would allow (not very), and stuck a three-foot cage on top. Now, a couple weeks later, they’ve easily doubled in size. They smell like tomato plants. They smell like childhood.

Insert tomato here.

Can I just say that I heart mulch? Weeding has been almost entirely unnecessary. And thanks to the big dramatic Kansas weather that keeps rolling through, I’ve hardly needed to water them at all.

What's eating me? Anyone?

As is the garden. About a quarter of my spinach plants drowned. From the rest, I plucked a handful of leaves today for lunch. Yum. My two pea plants continue to soldier onward (upward?); the taller wasted no time getting friendly with the makeshift trellis I installed yesterday.

Meanwhile, the tomatoes are taking over the sunroom. They’re crazy leggy and crazy thirsty. It’s getting time to harden them off and prepare a spot for them in the garden.

I moved all my tomato seedlings into 9-oz. clear plastic cups so that they could stretch out their leaves or whatever and do some serious sunbathing. Those that haven’t yet sprouted I left in the plastic contraption.

Five Black Krim, four Cherokee Purple and Crimson Cushion, three Hillbilly, one Zapotec, and a partridge in a tomato bush.

Out in the yard, my spinachlets are assembling their first true leaves. And I have two pea shoots. Two! Is more than zero!

I maybe perhaps need to learn to focus.

The Black Krim went nuts, with seven shoots, many of them big. Crimson Cushion and Cherokee Purple are poking up too. Still waiting on the rest.

and then the snow started...

Still no sign of my pea plants, but I knew the little spinach seedlings wouldn’t much like the storm. First I covered them with leaves. Then I built a teepee with a sheet and a tarp draped over this weird decorative stake left behind from the previous owners.

Today I disassembled the whole contraption, and it seems to have worked. The seedlings appear unharmed.

Meanwhile, my tomato-seeded pellets kind of look moldy. Urk.

Because I’m a clueless n00b, I thought an idiotproof kit would be the way to go this year. Jiffy pellets seem to get positive reviews all around, so I bought a little reusable Jiffy mini-greenhouse thingamajig. With a 25-pellet capacity and 50 pellets, it’ll be good for two rounds; if I like it, all I have to do is get more pellets.

The pellets are made of dehydrated peat. They have some sort of mesh encasing them:

Just add water! And they puff:

Per instructions, I peeled back the mesh from the top of each pellet and loosened the peat. Two seeds went into each pellet; assuming they sprout, I’ll thin down to one each. I used five pellets per variety to fill all 25 spots.

Then I put the clear plastic top on and placed the whole thing under a towel (for shade) in my south-facing sunroom (for warmth). When the pellets go gray, I’ll water. When the seedlings sprout, I’ll take the towel and top off and move them into full sun. And when the plants get too big for their britches, I’ll move the pellets into bigger individual containers and start hardening them off.

My goal is to transplant tomatoes in mid-May, and the consensus seems to be that I should start seeds indoors six to eight weeks early. So in theory I’m right on schedule. Once these little dudes graduate from the mini-greenhouse, I’ll start another round with my Red Grape seeds. I’m aiming for a glut of tomatoes this summer, with plenty left over to sauceify and can for winter.

Yesterday we watched the radar and waited for storms. High winds roughed us up all day but at bedtime the ground was still dry. Finally, at 2am on the dot, I awoke to thunder and the clatter of hail on the roof. I love me some big weather. Methinks Kansas was a good choice.

Up at Pinwheel Farm, the sheep have been shorn of their winter fleece. Veggies are going into (and already nosing up out of) the ground.

Best of all, here at home my spinach seedlings have appeared in neat little rows. I tarped them yesterday so that they wouldn’t blow away or drown, and sure enough they made it through the storm unscathed. Probably I should get my hands on a more appropriate row cover. Maybe Goodwill has some sheer curtains I can repurpose.

Marchtoberfest is in the tradition of Jangiving — a winter holiday conceived and implemented by my favorite people in the universe. Friends gather in Lawrence from around the country. A feast is eaten. Fun is had by all. Although this was our fifth year celebrating, it was Dan’s and my first year attending as Lawrencians. Without Jangiving, we might never have become Lawrencians at all.

We were two months late in celebrating this year, and we were rewarded for our delinquency with T-shirt weather. So I dragged everyone into my garden to plant spinach and peas. Arthur played cameraman.

Dan prepares the feline ruminant for a backyard jaunt.

I chose Sugarsnap peas and Bloomsdale Long Standing spinach, both from Ommas Aarden Heirloom Seed. The peas went into a single row along the south edge of the bed (was this a mistake? are they going to inappropriately shade my other plants?), and the spinach into two subsequent rows. Jacob helped me amend the soil with nice crumbly black compost from the bottom of our pile, which we’ve been working on since we moved in last June.

Farmer Jacob wields his pitchfork.

At this point I’ve only worked the soil in a ridiculously small fraction of one bed, as you can see in the next two photos. Before I continue I need to construct some sort of sifting device to deal with the overabundance of rocks and pebbles.

Arthur calls this my I'd-mock-you-but-you're-doing-it-for-me face.

Kayla grazes and Sera looks on while Jacob and I pretend we know what we're doing.

Once the seeds had gone in, I tucked the pea region back under leaves. Supposedly the seedlings are studly enough to poke their way up through a substantial mulch. The spinach region stayed naked. And that was that.

Earlier this week, when the thermometer was flirting with 70, I went out to investigate my sleeping future-veggie-garden beds. Last fall, in a valiant attempt to choke out the grass and weeds that had taken over, I buried them in a heavy leaf mulch and tucked them in under tarps. Beneath these blankets, the ground was warm, moist, and crumbly, full of earthworms and bugs. And rocks. Damn.

After tugging out all the grass, I sorted about ten skillion pebbles out of a couple square feet of soil. They’ll be great for re-pebbling the front walk. But by about twelve inches down the rocks had gotten too big and too numerous to conquer. I think I’ll have to add enough compost and topsoil to further raise the bed. Or something. I don’t really know what to do.

By the look of things today, I have some time to figure it out:

View from our balcony this morning.

Meanwhile, I’ve been investing my time and energy in two other local-food-esque outlets, summed up by my current favorite breakfast: egg in a basket. I’d post a picture but I ate it already. (The breakfast, not the picture.)

The bread comes from WheatFields, an artisan-style bakery in downtown Lawrence where I’m the bumbling new part-time employee. They make seriously yummy bread, people, and I try not to ruin any of it with my inexpert hands. It feels good to be learning a physical skill after spending so much time exercising my brain in front of the computer. Anyway, the bakery’s main flour supplier is right here in Kansas. The dough is hand-scaled and shaped, then hand-fed into a massive local-wood-fired brick oven. My favorite variety is the golden multigrain, chock-full of crunchy bits.

The egg comes from Pinwheel Farm, on the north edge of town, where Natalia Lowther raises sheep and chickens and a variety of vegetables with an admirably rigorous dedication to sustainability. She took me on as a volunteer/apprentice just as winter took hold of Lawrence. Since then I’ve been learning to tend to the livestock and the land. Right now it’s overwhelming how much I don’t know, and I think that feeling will linger for years to come. But Natalya patiently imparts her encyclopedic knowledge, and bit by tiny bit I’m absorbing the logic and intuition that hold the place together. Most of the chickens at Pinwheel are Araucanas, which lay beautiful bluish-green eggs. Never before have I had the experience of gathering an egg from the nest and eating it the same day. Talk about farm-fresh. The yolks are strikingly bright and full of flavor.

That’s all for now, folks.

I “borrowed” some brown sugar and cinnamon from S+J, whose cats I am sitting. It’s so handy to have friends who are also neighbors. It went better than the last time I “borrowed” ingredients from them, when I ended up with sesame oil all over my hands and soy sauce all over my bag. Unfortunately I didn’t realize we were also out of baking soda, so I ended up sending Dan on a quick fetch run. Usually I know better than to send him out without a written list (yes, even for one item), but this time I forgot. So when he came back with baking powder I sent him out again.

The cookies came out pretty good. They’re not quite as moist as I’d like, but it won’t stop me from eating more than my share of them before poker begins. They’re semi-local… the applesauce comes from local apples and the butter from local cows. At the Merc I was able to find local whole wheat flour, but not local all-purpose flour. I’ll have to keep hunting. It shouldn’t be hard. I mean, this is Kansas, people. Amber waves of grain much?

Cookies are an always food.