Cataract trail loop... sort of

Yesterday, Matt and I went up to Mt Tam to take advantage of the gorgeous weather and get in one last hike before heading off to New Hampshire. We chose a meandering route that was mostly made of either steep uphill or steep downhill sections, eventually making it up to 2300 ft. over 6.8 miles.  Mount Washington, here we come!

Full swing

The harvest this morning:

watermelon mint salad

Nothing says summer like a sweet watermelon! We first enjoyed this salad at one of our favorite local restaurants, Cascal, and then decided it was worth reproducing at home.

Watermelon mint salad

the ripest, sweetest watermelon you can find, cubed

lots of mint leaves, straight from the garden and chopped

scoops of goat cheese

thinly sliced watermelon radish

fresh ground pepper

Dressing:

drizzle with orange champagne vinegar (regular champagne vinegar will do in a pinch) and olive oil

The countdown begins!

We are getting excited about our upcoming trip to New Hampshire and Mt. Washington climb!  Only two weeks until we fly!  To get ready, we climbed to the top of Mission Peak this weekend: about 2 miles and 2,517 ft. elevation, roughly half of what Mt. Washington will be. There were lots of people out hiking, biking, and paragliding yesterday, and it was a great day to be outside.

Looking east from the summit

Looking north

Looking west  -- the hike started from those tiny houses at the base of the mountain.

Awesome music weekend, 2011

Adrian and Alissa came to visit this weekend, and we got to see them play two shows: one at Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View and the other at Bazaar Cafe in San Francisco. We also had some time to explore the beach in Half Moon Bay, where Brad and Jamee live. We hope they come back soon so we can do it all over again. :) All photos from the trip are here.

Adrian and Alissa at Bazaar Cafe in SF 

Adrian at Bazaar Cafe

Brad at Bazaar Cafe

Half Moon Bay is cold, despite it being July

Ladybug update...

They seem to have all flown away... Oh well :(

Another summer salad

This time the main players are: spinach penne, garbanzo beans, flat leaf parsley, red pepper, kalamata olives, and red onion with champagne vinegar, olive oil, and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese.

Ladybugs to the rescue!

We've started to discover little aphids on our tomato plants, and some sort of little white bugs in our lettuce. So, we swung by our garden store this weekend and picked up a container of ladybugs. It was the size of a pint of Ben and Jerry's - insert your own witty ladybug flavor here - and it said it contained 1,500 ladybugs!!!! We released them in the evening, per the instructions. Hopefully they'll take care of any pests that try to munch on our plants.

Zucchini Squash

We made our first significant harvest of the year last week: an enormous zucchini. After cutting it up and grilling it we were immediately perplexed; it seemed to be more like an acorn squash than a zucchini. Like, not a zucchini at all. So we put on our detective caps and got to thinking. We decided that when we picked up the baby plant it must have been labeled as a zucchini squash, and we assumed that just meant zucchini, when in fact it really was a squash... Ok, well after some research a zucchini actually IS a zucchini squash, so now we're even more confused. We don't know what went wrong. We might have waited too long and let it get too big. We're going to try harvesting some other ones when they're still small and see what those are like.