Here’s the view this week, after some serious rain and another weeding:

And here are a few closer looks. The peppers are coming along nicely:

And the carrots, depending on your vantage point, may be doing well too:

Apparently Mr. Chipmunk thought so, because he’s made a splendid meal out of precisely half of them (so far he’s eluded the surveillance video, but I have eyewitnesses):

But the cucumbers are flourishing:

As is the lettuce:

The peas remind me (for some reason) of Martians, but they’re beginning to flower:

And we have our first few cherry tomatoes:

Blurry, huh? I’m still figuring out my camera, as you can see from this photo of Mr. Munch, who let me get much closer this week:

I have no idea why the flash didn’t go off, but I thought the effect was kind of interesting anyway.

This week I wrote about living on the Marcellus Shale for Poetry Friday, and the local discussions about extracting natural gas. Our oil dependency in general is troubling, but it’s truly a helpless feeling to be conservation-minded and have no control over how the resources are extracted right in your own back yard. The property lines drawn on the surface have little meaning when we’re considering the effects of methods used to reach resources underground. I’m not anti-natural gas, but there are intelligent ways to extract it that leave the land productive and respect its inhabitants. I wish I felt more confident that a forbearing intelligence would be guiding the process.

I can’t control the mining industry, but I can grow a garden. I can produce some of my own food, and work with my own hands to take care of a small patch of dirt in a way that enriches it rather than depletes it. It combats the powerless feeling I have reading the paper sometimes. 

If you want to take a look at some other gardens, or share a post about your own, pop on over to Cloudscome’s Sunday Garden Stroll.