maintainence

i spent an hour and a quarter in the garden this morning...i went with no specific thing to do other than water, weed ( actually i am still grassing and wondering why nothing foreign has come up yet...there has to have been something in the three quartes of a ton of compost and composted manure i've chucked into that plot...where the deuce is it?), and generally maintain things...i also took a few photos of plants to include in the folder i'm going to upload for the iun webpage...nothing special...just routine...we've come a ways since the start...the top photo is the garden as it looked on the morning of 3 october 2009 and the bottom one i took today...some progress ( and i see my truck was parked in the same spot in both photos...unusual since meterd spaces on campus are catch as catch can and i end up parking far afield usually) and more work to do...tomatoes to plant yet...teosinte to coax along...and then finding something cogent to say about it all...i ran into a kindly soul from the maintainece staff on campus today ( whose name i did not get...although i did say THANK YOU! hopefully i will run into them again this summer and we can make the formal introductions) who set me up with a spigot outside hawthorn hall so i can stop running to the washroom to fill gallon jugs and haul them back to the garden...i'l still be filling jugs to quantify how much water i use beyond rainfall...two hundred and sixty-four gallons since april the tenth this year...but this will save considerable time...the arugula has flowered and the spinach on campus has about finished its season ( spinach at home still producing because of the shade it gets...on sunny days the campus garden is all sun) ...the elephant garlic is procrastinating in blossoming, so no photos yet...i'll pass those along, as well as those of the tomato planting process, as they occur...we have been fortunate in many ways so far this season...here's hoping our luck holds until fall...and beyond for that matter...more later.