An ordinary Saturday

Our apartment building is reroofing, so what wasn't ordinary was the pounding overhead. We escaped for lunch at the Cantor Museum café, and later in the day, after the roofers left, I went to the campus vegetable and flower farm to do a spot of weeding and deadheading. Normally I love weeding (makes the world more orderly) but resist deadheading. But 'deadhead all the flowers' was already on the list of tasks for volunteers last week, so I attacked the magenta dahlias (never much liked magenta anyway), strewing still beautiful dahlia flowers in my wake. When I returned this week--a week later--the magenta dahlias were thriving, so I guess they didn't mind and, as the chief gardeners say, the cut flowers make good compost. And I always set aside a bouquet for the kitchen counter. 

I deadheaded the dahlias (magenta, pink Japanese-painting ones, some tight, balled-up orangey ones) and then I weeded the field they grow in--another of the volunteer tasks. There were some tough-rooted things I couldn't get.

Meanwhile my husband had gone to practice on the music department harpsichord, and when he came back, he helped me with the last few weeds and we rewarded ourselves with some lettuce, fennils and herbs. It's amazing the difference in taste between lettuce you pick and lettuce from the supermarket. The sun was setting. Another volunteer, someone we hadn't seen in a while, came along with his daughter to pick flowers.