kimmykimmykokonut

There is something quite sublime about walking in the backyard barefoot to pick my lunch.

This is my second summer gardening in Seattle.  Once again, my tomato plants are big wimps and the okra has all died but two in the windowsill (one is covered in aphids).  I’m still trying, but my big champions this year are radishes and salad greens.  The radishes I didn’t even plant.  I got a bunch of random plants a few winters ago from a woman in Burien who needed to thin out her wild garden on a steep hillside (talk about a green thumb–her soil was all rocks).  I promptly forgot what she gave me and I planted them all last summer, didn’t want to pick them and let them go to seed.  The magical radishes went to seed, overwintered without a problem.  The also withstood the tiller this year and I now have somewhere in the vicinity of about 20 radishes growing randomly in the garden.  I never buy radishes because they usually taste gross and old in the market.  But so lovely is the crisp fresh taste of a just-picked radish.  If anyone needs some, please stop by.
Also, I never bothered with growing salad greens or lettuce before–somehow it just bored me…yes, I’m a vegetarian that is bored by salads and veggie burgers.  It’s just so generic and overdone.  I’m excited by salads only if there is an interesting dressing or other components such as toasted nuts, avocado, cheese–anything besides leaves in a bowl.  I bought some mesclun seeds and planted them every few weeks and they have grown faster than Matt and I can eat them.  This is a good thing because I’m experimenting with salads and eating my greens more than ever before.  I’m even experimenting with salad dressings, but don’t have any that I really love as much as balsamic vinegar and olive oil.  So if anyone has a small patch of dirt, I recommend planting some mesclun–the seed packet is about the cost of a bag of mesclun at the market, but it will keep growing, and growing and I still have more seeds to plant.
I will post a good salad dressing when I find one I like.  Picky, picky.
Please share one with me if you dare.

Hooray! My first blog entry and I get to share my new passion. I’ve been taking aerial classes for the past few months and just performed in my first show. I was worried I’d be nervous or pee in my leotard while hanging from the rafters…but turns out only the anticipation was scary. I LOVED being on stage and doing my thing. I was in the group piece at the end of a two hour show…so hopefully people were awake to enjoy my tutu power. It went really well, considering we only had one group practice where all 7 of us were there together. Maybe I liked it so much because it was so physical and I could concentrate on my moves, rather than remembering my lines and stage location. Acting was fun, but I think I enjoyed the community much more than all the other stuff. I was much more at home doing the aerial routine, and I wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been for Matt and his primo birthday presents. This year it was seeing Cirque du Soleil (awesome) and getting a home-cooked meal every Monday night so I could actually make it to aerial practice instead of getting lost in the kitchen for two hours cooking and forgetting about practice alltogether. Special thanks to Alyssa, a girl who can hang by her toes on the trapeze and still smile. She held me by her toes and didn’t drop me, as well as being present for my moments of utter frustration.
But no circus for the summer, my teacher is travelling with Circus Contraption and can’t teach classes. I’ll miss it, but it’s a good excuse for me to stop so I can try to lose some of this muscle mass in my shoulders because I don’t fit into my wedding dress anymore. Silly how that works. I guess it’s a summer of chocolate bars and sunbathing.