Strawberry birthday

I baked Ava a cake for her fifth birthday.  I feel like everyone deserves a homemade cake for their birthday with real butter and eggs in it.  For Ava I made a triple-layer strawberry cake (did you know you can put fresh strawberry puree in a cake?  marvelous), with fresh strawberry filling and pink cream cheese frosting.  It was way fun.  And what more thanks does a baker need than a picture like this?  Look at the strawberries in those cheeks!

Starting the garden

It's the end of April, which is the transitional planting season here so we had better get on the stick. We're probably already too late to do peas from seed. I don't mind living off nursery starts the first year, though - we are just getting to know the place.

Sue weeded the raised beds when she was here a couple weeks ago, and I weeded the back bed. Sue thought we probably needed fertilizer. Today I went to City People's Garden Center and talked to a great lady who could easily have been Mom, in her mellow attitude about gardening. I told her our situation and she said "Why don't you just wait a year and see what you've got?" But she agreed we should do an all-purpose fertilizer, and since we want vegetables, to go ahead with some cold-hardy starts. I picked collards, chard, and cabbage. The tender stuff doesn't go in the ground until May, around here.

All the soil seems really awesome, black and full of organic matter and worms. In the back of the back bed, the black stuff only went down a couple inches before I was mixing in reddish clay stuff; that must be the original dirt. I still thought it was good enough for the peas back there. That pea trellis was left here by the Slattons. (Not the white one - that's unused at the moment - the natural-branches teepee-shaped one in front of that.) There are three peas on each leg. I hope that's okay. The variety is Sugar Sprint Snap Pea. In the big dug-up zone to the right and in front of the peas are four collards (Champion), four cabbage (Early Jersey Wakefield - heirloom), and four swiss chard (Bright Lights). I want a lot of greens, and at the garden store it seemed like just a couple plants... but gee, they kind of took up a lot of room. They have to be pretty far apart.



The back bed has a ton of whatever in it which we will learn more about this year. There's a very successful perennial that might be lamb's ear, which would clearly eat the whole garden if given the chance. I left some in to see what it's like, and it's three times the size it was a couple weeks ago. There are also some bulbs in there, a pretty white narcissus kind of thing. (These pictures are definitely not the greatest - Dale had the good camera.)



In the first raised bed, last year's spinach and chard and kale and arugula are struggling into spring, so I just worked fertilizer around them. The arugula has totally bolted but I still like it. The spinach is yellowing; maybe the fertilizer will help. Seattle Tilth says that the brassicas are not going to do well in the same bed two years in a row, but we can't bring ourselves to pull stuff up.



The second raised bed has just a few chives and green onions. I fertilized and turned most of it. Now it has four more "Bright Lights" chard in it.



There's a good-looking rhubarb plant which I am eager to harvest some of, but I think I should wait. It's still pretty green.



Along the back deck there are climbers that we think are roses, and bulbs. Down at the bottom left is a mystery plant (in the closeup) that smells pretty minty; maybe catnip? Anyone know?



There's another bed that still has some raspberries in it. There are raspberries back by the peas, too. There's also a hazelnut tree, how cool is that? I wonder if we will get any before the birds and squirrels do. I chatted with the hazelnut lady at the farmer's market and she was not helpful... she suggested that we get a predator, like maybe a kestrel. She may have been nuts (in addition to selling them).



Here's our fruit tree (we're guessing apple), which needs pruning. One third of those vertical sucker things needs to be pruned back to nothing, one third should have one-third of the height cut off, and the other third left alone. I learned this from the Seattle Tilth garden hotline, which is staffed specifically to answer questions from gardeners like me. I should put them on speed dial.



And last but not least here is the construction zone. We try to convince the kids to dig only here, but of course they want to help us too.

Three knocks

We had our first night of Passover tonight, just through the Four Questions.  My innovation from last year, to break up the ceremony over several nights, continues to strike me as brilliant:  the kids are just starting to get restless and hey we're done for today, wasn't that fun?  Also reduces the burden on the solo cook.  

The boys' school closed early, so there was lots of time for them to participate in setting the table, cutting the early greens from our garden, and looking out for Elijah.  The funny thing was that just after we lit the candles, there was knocking.  Uh... Elijah?  No:  a woodpecker, on our back deck.  Okay.  Then during dinner, another knock!  Elijah!  No:  the UPS guy.  "But I didn't catch his nametag," quipped Dale.  Hm.  After dinner, we were all upstairs in the playroom, and there was another knock.  This time it was a canvasser, from the ACLU.  I gave her my standard treatment, but as I went back upstairs I thought - should I have invited her in?  The ACLU doesn't seem like an entirely unreasonable source of modern-day redemption.  The woodpecker I didn't feel bad about, and the UPS guy was already back in his truck by the time Dale got to the door, but the ACLU's young representative looked distinctly hopeful.  Have I delayed the messianic age?

Statements

Jordan was eating cashews with me (he loves cashews) when he said, "Mommy, let's always live in this house and never move to another house.  Because I like this house.  Let's live in this house until we die."  I smiled and hugged him and said I liked this house too, and we would stay here.  "Maybe someday you'll want to go to college, though," I said.  "Do you know what college is?"  He didn't.  I said how little kids go to school and then come home every day, but that when you get older, you can go to a school and live at the school, and it's pretty exciting.  He said, "I don't want to go to college, Mommy, because I don't want to live in another place.  I just want to live here."  Well, I'm glad that's settled.  That'll save a lot of money.

Aaron, meanwhile, came over to me with a penny, which he was excited to show off.  A penny is a sort of a terrible thing for a one-year-old to be playing with (choking hazard) and after dutifully admiring his find, I asked him where he got it.  "Was it on the table?" I asked.  He sat in my lap and said "Yeah," but then he always says that.  Then he turned around to look at me and said, "In basket."  I knew just which basket he meant (I had set it on the floor in our bedroom and meant to pick it up).  But the striking thing was his original, unprompted answer to an informational question.  Aaron communicates plenty, but most of what he says is so strongly contextual that you have to look at what's going on to figure it out.  This seems like new territory.

Peers

Flora and fauna

The weather was so wonderful today it made us remember all over again why we moved here. We had the windows open all day! And it's going to be like this for more than two weeks!

Before the Scan Design shopping spree we took a walk in the Mercer Island Slough, which has a great swamp trail full of skunk cabbages. Dale took many photos.





The children do not hold still so well, but they have their charms.

Midcentury mismatch

We are in a heady money-spending place: we have bought many pieces of furniture in the last week. First was our bedroom, which needed a dresser. We found it at the same place we bought our bed when we lived here many years ago, a neighborhood store with great products and service, and while they don't match they kind of speak to each other, both very dark espresso brown/black with clean lines. While there Dale spotted a fantastic bamboo night table, half off because it had been marooned without the rest of its set. We loved it and snatched it up even though it is... bamboo colored. We are not much for matched furniture. There is an overall Asian thing going on in there now, in natural colors with strong black accents. It works.


We also got a futon from the same place for the big room upstairs, which is going to be in a family room formation of some kind. The smaller room will be the guest room. This is on the theory that guests need privacy more than they need space.

Today at last we found the piece that will let me finalize the systems in the kitchen: a sideboard/hutch combination at Scan Design. We have been searching for ages and it is a big relief to have found something good. (Can't find a photo, sorry.) While there we also fell hard for dining room chairs... currently we have two fading hand-me-downs and six folding chairs. The new ones have a wood seat unlike the one below, but are surprisingly comfy, and easy to clean. And last but not least, a loveseat, which our new larger living room has been asking for. Color! Whee!



Grandma would have loved Scan Design. She had good taste.