That's one surprised plate of food! We had a good brunch today--cinnamon rolls and potatoes with bacon and onions. Good stuff, but not good for us! We've agreed to take a bacon hiatus after today (we're having BLTs with the last of the bacon and our heirloom tomatoes for dinner).

P.S. We love our cast iron pan!

First of all, there are a few new garden pictures up. Click on the first peas of the summer to see the rest.

A lot has happened in the past three weeks, garden-wise. Our tomato plants have grown a lot, but they are still suffering from cabbage worms, despite my best efforts to remove them all from our garden, and Dona is not doing too well. There's also a wasp or hornet who likes to hang around the garden all day, which makes it hard to do much garden work. There are fewer ants on our tomato plants, but they haven't left all together. I still don't understand what they're finding to eat.

Our strawberry plants are too busy putting out runners to make strawberries, but we've gotten two berries out of them in the past few weeks. Hopefully they'll get back to fruiting soon! We had the first tomato of the season on Thursday, and it was good! The tomato that had been on Black Krim since we bought it finally decided to turn red. I was worried it would be rotten after having sat on the plant for so long, but it was really tasty! I hope we get more tomatoes soon!

We've also got our first peas of the season growing, but I need to figure out when to harvest them. I'm not sure how big I should let them get. Oh, and then there are our collard greens, which are growing slowly. It's pretty easy to keep the cabbage worms off of them because there aren't many leaves to inspect. And that's the end of my garden update. Now for the requisite wedding update...

As you may recall, we went to Big Sur last weekend to meet with the wedding coordinator at Ventana. It went well. We got there early and had a delicious lunch out on the terrace (where the wedding will be). It's just so beautiful out there! It's too bad a lot of the plants will be turning brown by October; they have some really nice herbs growing around the terrace, and the arbor (where our reception/lunch will be held) has honeysuckle all over it. But I'm sure it will be beautiful all the same, just in a different way. Here's a picture of a sculpture at Ventana with the arbor in the background.

After lunch, we met with the coordinator (she's not our wedding planner or anything; she just coordinates events for the venue). It was a good check that we had everything in order. The only thing that got added to our to do list was to make place cards and a seating chart (that'll be easy, since there's only 1 table and 17 people). I'm excited to make place cards! We still need to figure out if we'll have music and what the logistics of that would be. Oh, and we need to plan the whole ceremony, but for some reason that doesn't feel too urgent.

After our meeting, we headed over to Pfeiffer Beach for a little bit and sat around. We're planning on going over there after the wedding with any interested guests, assuming the weather is decent. We've also decided to try and organize a brunch (again including guests) for that Sunday morning so we can see people one more time before we leave for our honeymoon. I'm hoping that we have few enough people that we can just make a reservation at a restaurant and not have it be a lot of work.

We're having our first dinner as a married couple at Sierra Mar. I'm looking forward to it! They have really good food, and assuming the weather is clear, we'll be able to see the sunset over the ocean (last time we were there, it was cloudy, but still a beautiful view). I'm glad we have a good excuse to splurge :)

So anyway, after we went to the beach, we met with our photographer. She's really energetic and outgoing, and she does beautiful work. She's also photographed weddings at Ventana before, which makes me feel more confident that everything will go well.

We've been saying we should learn Italian for our honeymoon for a while now, and thanks to Patrick, we finally are! He bought us a book/CD set that claims we will learn Italian in 6 weeks. We're already 25% done with it, and it's been pretty easy so far, but now we're getting into conjugating verbs and the four types of adjective endings and stuff, so I think it's going to get harder. But we know how to talk about the weather in Italian, so that's good :)

Today we went hiking in Big Basin with Tree and Andrew. It was fun seeing them! The hike was pretty enjoyable except for a few uphill parts, but we got to eat good sandwiches (with heirloom tomatoes from our box!), so that made up for it.

Tomorrow we're going to San Francisco to pick up my wedding dress (it arrived a few days ago, but Tree's dress won't be ready until the beginning of September due to some sort of communication glitch between Bella Bridesmaid and Thread. But they're handling it, so I'm not going to worry about it). While in SF, we're also going to stop by Paper Source (both SF locations are within a 1-mile radius of Bella Bridesmaid!) and possibly buy paper for our invitations. I love that store!

Also, Patrick is awesome, and I'm so glad I get to be married to him! I just thought you should know :)

As I said earlier, camping last weekend was fun. Every year, my stepdad's family goes camping for a week in Shaver Lake, CA, at Dinkey Creek campground. Patrick and I joined them (and my mom) for the weekend, and I'm glad we did. There were maybe 50 people there (it's a big family), and I'd met a few of them before. They were all so nice and welcoming to Patrick and me! I think we'd almost figured out how they were all related by the end of the weekend :)

There were a bunch of good meals; they've gotten really good at orchestrating everything after 30-odd years. There is a huge 20-inch Lodge skillet used for cooking bacon and eggs every morning (apparently they no longer make them that big, which made us sad). And a bunch of the siblings contributed delicious food for dinners. Both nights, after it was dark, everybody sat around a bonfire and sang songs (they're a very musical family). And there were way fewer bugs than at our last camping trip. It was a good camping experience (we certainly weren't roughing it at any point!).

The family has a bunch of favorite hikes and special spots around Dinkey. My mom and stepdad took us to the falls (pictures of me after the hike and Patrick swimming) and to Heavenly Pool. Patrick swam three different times, but I just dipped my feet in the water. Patrick also jumped off some cliffs (maybe 5 meters above the water) along with my stepbrother and other younger, more daring members of the family. Apparently they do it all the time, and Patrick waited until a bunch of people had done it safely before trying it himself. I'm glad he didn't get hurt!

We were sad we only got to spend two days there (although it was nice to get home to a real bed and a shower). I hope we can go again next year and see more of Dinkey Creek and my extended step-family.

I was worried about leaving our garden unwatered for a whole weekend, but it did just fine. However, it has other problems. I've been pulling cabbage worms off of our plants twice a day all week, and I thought I'd almost gotten all of them, but now there are baby cabbage worms all over the place again--the second generation, I guess. It feels like a losing battle. Especially since ants also invaded the garden a few days ago and are swarming all over the tomato plants. They don't seem to be eating the plants, so I'm hoping they're either eating the cabbage worm eggs/babies or the cabbage worm poop (there's a lot of it!). I guess as long as our tomatoes keep growing I shouldn't let it bother me, but it's unpleasant all the same.

The good news is that both our indoor and outdoor herb gardens are doing well (I've just ignored the fungus gnats, and somehow there are less of them than there were intially), and none of our garden plants are dead because of the pests; just sad-looking. Patio Hybrid F is still pumping out tomatoes (none ripe yet), despite being assaulted by creepy crawlies.

In wedding news, Patrick is making good progress on planning our honeymoon, which is very exciting! We have our tickets, and we have a rough schedule. We're leaving the day after our wedding, and we'll spend 2 days in Rome, 3 in Montepulciano (in Tuscany), 1 in Florence, and then 1 more in Rome. We're hoping to split our time between seeing lots of stuff (in Rome and Florence) and relaxing (in Montepulciano). We will eat plenty of good food everywhere we go! I think this will be a great vacation, and I'm so happy I get to spend a whole week of quality time with Patrick :) Honeymoons are a good idea!

Also, I bought two potential wedding necklaces from Hovey Lee (I first found out about her from Tree when she was planning her wedding). Normally I wouldn't buy such nice jewelry for myself, but it's nice to have a good excuse to do so. The two necklaces are Nirvana III and Japon. I'm going to wait until my dress arrives (it should be here in a few weeks) to decide which one to wear at the wedding. I love them both! The question is whether I want a striking necklace or something a little more subtle.

I'm working on designing our wedding invitations every so often, when I'm not busy prying cabbage worms off our plants. Since we have fewer than 10 invitations to send out (many of our 15 guests live at the same addresses), I'm making them myself. I want to do a good job, but I also need to have them ready sometime soon so we can send them out! It'll all come together...

I'm excited for our wedding! It's almost all planned, except for the ceremony (which is the most important part, but also the part we can put off until the last minute because there aren't any vendors involved). We're going down to Big Sur on Sunday to meet with Ventana's wedding coordinator to get some questions answered and hopefully to pick out our wedding menu (we probably won't get to sample all the choices though--that has to be requested ahead of time and costs extra). After that, we're going to have a quick meeting with our photographer. She likes meeting her clients before their wedding day, and it seems good to discuss things a little bit beforehand. We don't have a big list of photos we want her to take though. I just want lots of pretty candid pictures.

Tomorrow we get to visit my grandma, mom, and two aunts! We also visited them (minus one aunt) last night, and it was so much fun! I like my family. I'm glad they like Patrick :)

Last game of the softball season was tonight. Our team ended up last out of all 7 teams. But we were the nicest and had the best sportsmanship, so there! It was a fun season; I'm sad it had to end. I'm glad Patrick got to play on our team and got to know my coworkers. They're a good group of people.

In other news, we went camping with my stepdad's extended family last weekend, and I actually enjoyed myself! (Previous camping trips have not worked out so well, despite the good company) I plan on writing a more involved entry later, but who knows when that'll happen...

You know how there were some holes in our collard greens? Well, they got much worse, and we also found holes in our tomato leaves, pea leaves, and radish leaves. No good!

I got up close and personal with our garden today to try and figure out what was eating everything, and it turned out to be not one but two kinds of cabbage worms--cabbage loopers on the righthand side and imported cabbage worms on the lefthand side (they exhibited markedly different behavior when I poked them and when crawling, as the webpage said they would). Here's a picture of a cabbage looper; the imported cabbage worm looks pretty similar, but it has legs all along its body.

One option for combating them was using Knock Out Gnats (the container of which I still haven't opened even though we still have fungus gnats in our herb garden), which is a strain of Bacillus thuringiensis and is supposed to kill cabbage worms. However, I'd rather not apply it to plants we're going to eat someday, since the package isn't clear on whether it's safe for vegetable and herb gardens. So instead Patrick brought me some pliers, and I spent about an hour pulling the worms off the bottoms of all our plant leaves. I doubt that I got them all, but I'll keep checking, and hopefully that'll solve the problem for the most part. I also pulled out all of our radishes because they were a good hiding place for the worms, since they're all obscured by our tomato plants now. They weren't doing a good job of making radishes anyway (not enough sunlight?). It's not a big loss, although I wouldn't have minded having radishes to eat.

One of our apartment complex's outdoor cats joined me during my cabbage worm safari, which made it a more entertaining experience. She's white and fluffy, and she seems to be the friendliest of them all. She has come to visit me before (and always tries really hard to sneak inside our apartment when I go in). She was really interested in the container with all the cabbage worms in it, but not the worms themselves. She did try to attack our one ripening strawberry, which was cute despite being very unwelcome behavior. She also kept getting in my way, but it didn't matter because I got to pet her tummy and she purred and everything. What a nice kitty :) I hope someday we can have our own cat.