i’ve been immersed in the home-buying process all weekend; chris and teresa just bought a house in palo alto, and matt and carrie, who have decided to move to california (!!), were here for the weekend looking at houses in berekely. i was more than happy to come along and ooh and ahh over every built-in ironing board cabinet and clawfoot tub and instance of subway tile. however it’s fortunate that home-buying in this market is so very very far out of our financial reach that it’s not even tempting. so i can enjoy the process vicariously without wishing i could go out and buy a house of my own.

but it did seem to kickstart the nesting instinct just the same. after a busy weekend full of family, i was happy to come home to a quiet, clean house. relatively clean because we had house guests (thanks for giving us a reason to clean the kitchen floor, house guests!), and quiet because ben’s away at a wedding in chicago. the weather is gorgeous; i opened windows and doors and let the sunlight in and the cat out. i made bread dough, and while the dough rose in a bowl on the counter, i sat with a cup of tea and my gardening book. i made big plans, but managed to rein myself in to only executing small tasks and laying the groundwork for bigger projects today. i repotted much-neglected house plants and took new cuttings of other ones. i raked leaves out of the front garden beds and scattered cutting flower seeds. i took some “before” pictures of the back garden bed and plotted what i’d need to transform it.* (nasturtiums, poppies, dahlias, lavendar, rosemary, mint, strawberries).

certainly the strangest discovery of the day was when i was raking the dry, dusty leaf-covered front garden bed, and a few inches under the surface of the dirt i found…tiny round potatoes. huh? definitely no signs anywhere of potato plants. how did they get there? did someone scatter tiny potatoes in the yard in hopes that they would grow into plants? did the neighbors just chuck their unwanted potatoes into my garden during their last bbq? and why haven’t the potatoes rotted, or started to grow, or something, in the damp weather we’ve had for the past five months? mysterious.

i’m inspired by the idea of container gardening out of found objects rather than buying expensive pots and containers, and one of the garden book’s suggestions was to re-purpose what they called “construction bricks” — any kind of brick that has a hole in the center. it just happens that piled in the front of my yard is a stack of about a dozen cinder blocks. i put on gloves and hauled them out of the pile of weeds and dirt, stood them on end and used the hose to spray off all the dirt and spiders. (spiders!) the next step will be to figure out how to arrange them on my porch to make a tiered, multi-level container garden out of what is a solid set of concrete steps.

* earlier this year, not 24 hours after i’d planted nasturtium seeds in that particular weedy bit of ground, my neighbor pitched a couple of old mattresses and other assorted unwanted furniture out into the yard. right on top of where i’d planted seeds. where they stayed for the next two months. between that and the chainlink fence and the corrugated steel siding, we’re super classy around here.