I’m sorry that there’s been precious little food blogging this week. That’s partly because I’m way, way behind on a major ghost writing project and am scurrying to catch up. Mostly, however, it’s because there has also been precious little cooking this week.

Why, you ask?

Because I’ve been busy making this happen:

And this:

And this too:

All told, we’ve filled 10 raised beds with flowers and veggies galore this week, plus done some new landscaping on the front and side of the house. This is my third year doing (relatively) intensive gardening, and I’m hoping this year’s harvest is as good as last year’s.

By the end of last summer, with more tomatoes and peppers put up than I thought I could possibly use (and more cucumbers and zucchini than I could possibly eat), I took to wandering the neighborhood in the evenings, bags of produce in hand. Whatever neighbors I ran into, got themselves a bag.

So, yes, I looked a little crazy. If you had pepper plants producing over 200 peppers a week, though, you’d be a little crazy too.

This year’s crop includes 8 tomato plants (2 Big Boy, 4 Roma, 2 cherry), 8 pepper plant of various sorts (banana, jalapeno, Hungarian), 2 cucumber plants, 6 kale plants, swiss chard, arugula, spinach, strawberries, and about a dozen herbs. We’ll do brussels sprouts later in the summer. Expect the blog in July, August, and September to be very tomato, cucumber, and pepper heavy.

For now, however, I’m just looking forward to the day, later in the summer, when the little plants we put in the ground last week…

…grow big and fat, making my backyard look like this once more.