Today’s harvest: English peas (green arrow) and Swiss chard.

On April 5, 2014, I became a gardener. Since then it’s been hard to keep my mind off my plants. For the spring/summer, I’ve got peas, spinach, chard, lettuce, kale, collards, cabbage, beans, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, winter and summer squash, melons, and a whole lot of herbs (whew!). These leaves and vines are teaching me a whole lot about patience and biology and history, and I’m going to post occasional photos and anecdotes about them. I could claim that this project will benefit my dissertation, which is about writers who were/are obsessed with agriculture (eg Thomas Hardy and Willa Cather), but really it’s just fun.