The Firstfruits

Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen some tremendous growth in our garden. The lettuce is tall enough we can cut and eat; our zucchini, squash, and cucumber plants have grown to ridiculously large sizes; the tomato plants are starting to bud their first flowers; and a number of bees have fortunately found our little aisle of vegetable plants (that was the happiest I’ve ever been to see bees in my life!).

In addition to the bees, which have only recently begun to do their job, I’ve had to self-pollinate some of the plants by using a cotton swab to extract pollen from a male flower and take to a female one. Ok, so maybe that sounds a little gross (Amber finds it slightly offensive); yet nevertheless, I can say I’m the proud ‘father’ of our first two squash.

On the other hand, we’re still waiting for our peppers to take off, as they’ve been a bit slow going. AND, it seems I’ve discovered that I’m prone to breaking out in a ghastly allergic rash when brushing up against the leaves of vegetable plants! Ugh!

In other news, things are finally starting to slow down a bit after I preached at my church and re-took the GRE two days later on July 2nd. I didn't do as well as I had planend (on either of them), but it's over and I'm quite relieved. Now its on to filling out more paperwork for applying to PhD programs and preparing for August. In August, we have two weddings in our hometown of Lafayette, IN (one is my brother's), school starts up again, and I have a paper to present in Seattle that requires some further work.