Plants, porn, pizza, and pi

I should warn you that for the last few weeks I have been (and continue to be) absolutely obsessed with the coming gardening season. I got a little wild this year and spent $12 on vegetable seeds. Previous years I bought almost all my vegetable plants, but the seeds are more economical, and I just get so excited about the whole process from buying to planting to watching them sprout that I don't even think of the extra work as being "work". And this way I can share with Mom and she won't have to buy many either (we'll both need to buy tomatoes). Here's what I planted last weekend and early last week:

16 spinach

32 carrots

8 pumpkin

32 sunflowers

8 cantaloupe

24 corn

16 bell peppers

8 crookneck squash

8 zucchini

8 lemon cucumber

3 regular cucumber

16 basil

48 peas

That's a total of 226 seeds! I may have gone a little overboard, but I'm planning to lose about half (they won't germinate, or the bugs will eat them, or they won't survive transplanting), and give half to Mom. That still leaves 56 plants for me. Yikes. I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to raise that many plants previous years, but Patrick is going to install drip irrigation so I won't have to spend an hour watering every night. I'm getting excited just thinking about it. And do you know what I saw today? The very first one is starting to push the dirt away! I'm not at all surprised it's a sunflower (big seed and fast-growing plant). In the next two weeks the rest should pop up, one by one, and I'll drive Patrick and Mom crazy with the daily status updates.

You're probably wondering about why "pornography" is in the title of this post. Well, I figured pornography is so prevalent on the internet that I should post some, too, so here it is:

I was in the garden last weekend, minding my own business, when I saw these two. Yes, that's my patch of oregano they're leaving. And yes, that larger one is the female. She seemed... unfazed... by his attentions.

Moving on...

In celebration of Pi Day, we had a dinner party and served pizza pies and an apple pie. I took a picture of our dry-run pizza from last weekend. We made the crust and sauce from scratch, so I was very proud, even if it doesn't quite look like what you would get in a restaurant:

The actual event yesterday involved 3 pizzas, and each crust turned out slightly different, even though they should have been identical. All in all, the food turned out well. I'm definitely getting better at rolling out dough for pie crusts, it ends up mostly in one piece now. I just need more practice...more delicious practice...