One of my favorite pleasures of late is making and eating a salad with the lettuces, arugula, spinach, and carrots from our garden.

Yesterday was beautiful. We began the day with a few rounds of canasta and a hike. I filled my afternoon hours by potting baby plants. Our tomato and cucumber plants are about 4 inches high. The beets and peppers seem to be growing slower, but so far are doing well.

Less pleasantly, I had aphid duty and carefully cleaned the undersides of leaves for all our inside plants (specifically from our basil plants), and then coated the clean leaves with canola oil. Hopefully this will deter a return from these nasty pesks.

A week ago I began an exciting adventure into raising earthworms. I adore them! Snark helped make the worm bin, which is essentially two buckets, one set inside the other bucket. The top bucket has holes drilled into the top and bottom and is layered with burlap, dirt, coffee, paper, fruit and vegetable discards, tissues, and worms! I hope they're happy.

This morning was, again, a lovely day and we went on another hike up in the hills. Later in the day we walked downtown, stopping in our favorite places such as High Desert Market and Mimosa's. We tried out Old Bisbee Brewing Company (the new microbrewery on Brewery Gulch), which was pretty wonderful for such a little town. We stopped in Hot Licks and chatted with Karen, the owner, for a while; we were hoping EATS, their new kitchen, would be open, but it wasn't opening for a couple of hours, so we finally wandered back up the hill.