Behind Infinity

Quite well, actually.

Cilantro, basil, and chives.
In other words –salsa, pesto, and margherita pizza!

Here it is, all planted. Left row has lettuce and green onion, then a box of beans, then the peppers and squash box. Right row has peas, then my box of 10(!) tomato plants, and then the cucumbers.

Look–it’s a lovely little tomato blossom on one of the early-bearing plants. I cannot wait to harvest the tomatoes. I planted 8 different varieties (some that bear early in the season, some that bear late) and I’m looking forward to BLTs, salads and salads while they’re fresh, and canning the excess for making sauces and soups in the winter.

Peas. They’re starting to climb. I love the way they grab onto the twine with their little plant feelers.

Lettuce. We had our first garden lettuce salad on Sunday. It was pretty delicious.

Pepper plants in the foreground, squash in the background. Those squash plants will turn into enormous people-eating jungle plants by the end of the summer.

And now–on a totally unrelated note, here are photos of last weekend’s horse show (May 22). All photos courtesy of Marie (except the ones with her in them!)

It was a larger show, so we stayed overnight in the barn instead of showing out of the trailer.

pretty braid!

adorable…

Marie and Starr won 6th place in the Novice Rider class, Marie’s first show ever! I was so proud.

It was the first time showing in an indoor for both of my mares. Neither one of them was very happy about it at first. Jezebelle and I rode 3 classes on Friday night and she was totally goofy and uncomfortable with the situation, so we didn’t do very well. After classes ended on Friday I did a 2-hour ride with Starr (it took her that long to settle down!) and another 1/2 hour with Jezzie, and then things were better.

Here’s Starr and I, waiting for our class. I rode Starr in 2 hunter classes. We didn’t place in either of them (there were 20+ horses in each class) but we did have a good trip both times, which, at this point, is what we’re looking for.

And here’s our ribbons.

4th place Native Costume, Brittany + Jezzie
1st place Dressage Novice Rider Training test 1, Brittany + Jezzie
3rd place Dressage Novice Horse Training test 1, Brittany + Jezzie
6th place Dressage Equitation, Brittany + Jezzie
4th Place Sport Horse In Hand, Brittany + Jezzie
1st Place Dressage Novice Rider Intro Test A, Brittany + Starr
4th Place Dressage Novice Horse Intro Test A, Brittany + Starr
6th Place Novice Rider Pleasure, Marie + Starr
3rd Place Saddleseat Equitation Championship, Brittany + Jezzie

This weekend we’re back at WMAHA (our favorite club!) at the Hudsonville Fairgrounds. I’ll be showing both horses, Marie will be showing Starr for 2 or 3 classes, and Brenna will be showing Jezebelle for 3 or so classes. The weather forecast is calling for mid-70’s and it should be a great day.

I honestly don’t know where this week went.
The application I have been developing at work needs to be finished next week so I have been very focused on that. I spent an evening cleaning and organizing the barn, and another two working on freelance stuff. I’m wrapping up violin lessons for the year so that I can have somewhat of a carefree summer. And two of my favorite people graduated today, so there was a lot of celebration to do. The garden is getting greener and greener and soon it will be time to add in the tomatoes, peppers, and other late-spring plants. And I’m in hardcore preparation for horse show season. Lots of training to brush up, entries to fill out, equipment to clean, fix, organize, pack.

Also, this week I worked on a little project.

Hey, Melinda. Remember that deck rail that you loved so much? Because it was so, *ahem* sturdy?

Well, it’s gone.

I tore it off and replaced it with a better one.

Dad helped a little. Or actually a lot. OK, we did it together. Ethan helped me finish it up, too. And Brycen kept picking up stuff when I dropped it. It was a family effort. But I was kind of the mastermind of the whole thing.

And this is the result. You can lean on it and throw yourself against it, and it does not threaten to give way and let you fall to your death. I think that’s pretty cool.

Now who’s coming over for a cookout?

The vegetable garden is my new obsession. This is the first of (what will probably be) many posts about it over the course of the coming summer.

This is dirt…my dirt…our dirt. It’s wonderful dirt, a mixture of the soil we trucked in for last year’s garden and the manure my horses have been faithfully producing all year long. It just astonishes and thrills me that poop+plants+sunshine+water = delicious vegetables.

I planted seeds in these two boxes on Friday night, before the rain came this weekend. The box on the left has snow peas and regular peas, and the one on the right is 2/3 lettuce and 1/3 green onions. In about 45 days, we’ll be having a lot of peas and salads.

Here’s a wider shot of our garden. It’s a work in progress to be sure. Not your average square of tilled earth with vegetables marching in soldier-straight rows. We garden in raised beds instead, which we find advantageous for a variety of reasons. This arrangement provides much better drainage than our gross heavy mucky clay topsoil, and makes it a lot easier for us to control the soil content. It’s also a lot easier to keep the weeds out, and having the plants off the ground a little makes it easier to get at them when it’s time to harvest the goodness they produce. The arrangement allows us to efficiently use this space on the hill next to our house, which would otherwise be pretty useless. I designed and built the four original boxes (the grey, weathered ones) last spring, setting the sides into the hill for that terraced effect, and I’m pretty darn proud of how they turned out. They are 12ft long and 4ft wide, good sized but allowing easy access to all the plants, and they cost about $20 each to assemble. As for the smaller boxes, a friend of Dad’s recently salvaged those from the trash for us thinking they’d burn great in our woodstove–which they would have–but instead we’re going to add a row of them to the far end of the garden and grow more stuff.

The weekend was rainy, so we engaged in some indoor gardening of the plant-herb-seeds-in-pots variety. But we had to paint the pots first. Because it’s a well-known fact that herbs grow better in pretty pots than they do in plain ones.

Everybody got involved.

We had so much fun and they all turned out so creative and beautiful!

These are 7-year-old Brycen’s pots.

Brenna made this very cool one with day on one side and night on the other. What a great idea.

Two more of Brenna’s.

Ethan did this cool dragon pot.

He also did this ridiculously awesome Mario pot.

Braelynn’s sweet flower and bug pots.

I painted this birdie.

My other pot, a patchwork design.

Aaaand, Jamison’s work of art.

I was really impressed with the kids’ artistry and it was a fun thing to do together on a boring Saturday. When the plants grow, we will have basil, tarragon, cilantro, chives, parsley, oregano, and….um….a couple of other things I forget. Eventually, when the weather gets warmer, we’ll probably transplant them to one of the garden boxes so they have more room to grow.

It’s going to be a very delicious summer…stay tuned.