The fruits vegetables of my labor

How cool is this?

Green beans, radishes and spinach, all from my garden. There are a few snow peas out there, one teensy tiny tomato and a whole lotta squash blossoms – a pretty good predictor of a whole lotta squash!

We're going to toss the spinach with some store-bought romaine for dinner tonight. Last night I added the radishes and green beans to potatoes and onions, dressed it with a (low-fat) mayonnaise-(non-fat) yogurt-horseradish dressing and called it potato salad. Very yummy.

I'm learning quite a bit from this garden.

I planted a row of sunflowers, which are doing very well, along the south side to act as a deer-preventing decoy. The fence I put up is enough to keep the deer out (so far), so I could have used the flower space for vegetables.

I should have planted more snow peas. Not very many of them came up; we'll be lucky to have enough for two stir-fries, the way it's looking now.

I enjoy vegetable gardening waaaaay more than flower gardening. The flowers along the driveway are very pretty, and I actually picked some over the weekend. But I'd rather eat my labor than look at it. Too bad I didn't figure this out years ago. I've been mowing three acres for the past 12 years; I could have been planting vegetable gardens all over the lawn!

Took a short walk yesterday, after a couple of well-deserved rest days. My arms no longer ache when I raise them. Hoeing weeds is hard work! I hope to take a longer one today, but I also have quite a to-do list to work on before we leave for our next activist trip to Washington, DC, on Wednesday.

Four of us are going together – my husband and me and another couple. We're leaving early so we can visit the Air and Space Museum at Dulles Wednesday afternoon, and then Thursday morning we're donning matching red t-shirts and marching from the Washington Monument to Capitol Hill in support of single-payer health care reform. I made the t-shirt transfers yesterday (using transfers for dark shirts, so they don't have to be printed in reverse), and will iron them on today.

I'm also making lots of these buttons to hand out while we're there. I live in one of the, um, less-progressive states in America, but wherever I wear my button I get positive comments.

I think I'll take my walk before I tackle that list, which includes mowing those three acres and cleaning the house, doing some laundry and watering the flowers. No rain in sight for the next few days – quite a change from this year's wet spring. The farmers around here will be able to make hay while the sun shines and hopefully it won't rain on our parade later this week.

Hope you all had a great weekend.