It's a veg-eh-tuh-ble.*

Soooo, gardening.  It's not a topic I would ever normally contemplate talking about, mostly because I kill EVERYTHING.  Seriously, the depths of my botanical ignorance know no bounds.  However, my dear husband (I need to figure out something to call him here.  Ooh, I know!  MARK.**  He shall henceforth be known as Mark!) has decided to embrace his inner farmer.  Project Grow Shit commenced last year, when I returned home from a weekend away (in March!  We live in northern VA!  It was still cold!) to find containers of dirt pods covering nearly every windowsill in our house.  That was about as awesome as it sounds, in case you were curious.  Anyway, he had decided to plant cherry tomatoes and basil seeds, and boy did he!  By the time planting weather rolled around, we had a boatload of plants, and despite my skepticism, he planted them all. 

IN ONE CONTAINER.

Ahahahaha -- yeah, that worked out really well.  We had about 12 very tart little tomatoes all summer long, while the roots were busy choking each other to death.  I really wish that was the worst of the blunders, but alas, there was the day I came home to find that he had planted a bell pepper plant and a jalapeno pepper plant in the same container.  We harvested 2 miniature (and oddly bitter/spicy) green bell peppers from that pot.  My favorite was the day I came home to find a large, leafy plant hanging from the strawberry Topsy Turvy.  It was a ZUCCHINI.  He planted a zucchini, which grows to be ginormous and heavy, in a wee strawberry bag.  Not only did it not produce zucchini (imagine that!), it also managed to kill the strawberries.  He was so adorably enthusiastic though!

This year he (sort of) learned from his mistakes.  While he did begin the window plantings and outdoor transfers absurdly early again, the lesson about not overplanting really sank in.  The one about less being so much more?  Not so much.  We have a ton of what seem to be healthy and productive plants (in individual pots, hooray!), but they cover about 90% of our usable outdoor space:

Siiiigh.  What can I say?  Luckily, I love the snot out of the guy, otherwise I might have killed him by now.

All of this (i.e. the most boring entry ever) was all to get to the boxes of arugula in the middle of the table up there.  I was hanging out by myself this weekend, just puttering around while Mark was out of town, and decided it was high time to harvest some of that arugula for lunch.  I had gotten some fabulous heirloom cherry tomatoes at Trader Joe's, so I chopped them up and mixed them with some salt, pepper, basil, and olive oil.  I popped a mini baguette in the oven, and went out to snip some lettuce.  This was around the time that I realized that the arugula?  It is INFESTED with all of these wee red bugs, which Google is telling me are spider mites.  SO GROSS.  It took me over 10 minutes to wash the arugula, each little leaf, one by one, making this the most work intensive salad I think I have ever made.  Tasty, but what a pain in the ass:

In summary:  1.)  $3 for a bag of prewashed arugula is a freaking bargain, and 2.) hot damn, I need to come up with some better ideas of things to write about, because this here?  Is BORING.

*My Blue Heaven. 
**When Not-Mark and I first started dating, one of my best friends (and perhaps the only reader of this here blog) could not remember his name, like, EVER.  She would always refer to him as Mark, and I would be all, um, who now?  (Granted, she lives in another country and had not met him, and our general means of communication was a daily flurry of emails, so sure, confusing.  She's much better now that he's been around for a number of years and they've met several times and all.)