>my friend rana asked to see some pictures of the house (well, houses, really) on the blog, and i was so happy to find that someone actually looked at this blog at all, that i felt compelled to oblige. i uploaded them in an odd order, but i will try to explain it all:
The “red house” (so christened by baki) is the house where we sleep in summer; baki sleeps in the house and we sleep in the glass room in the back. it also doubles as a guest house.

last year, we planted a banana tree and it died way way back in the winter. it looked so bad that we chopped it down, leaving a stub. well, inside the stub we found green, and after a little while the green telescoped out and unfolded into a leaf. by summer, a tree had emerged, then another and another. in the background is the “brown house” where we live in the winter (and are there now, as my mom is in the red house). it also serves as command central in the summer months.

the outdoor kitchen has undergone a lot of changes recently. in this view, you can see right through it to the oven, which i will be firing up tomorrow to make bread, cupcakes for baki, and granola for breakfast.

and in this view you can see how i have evicted the table from the kitchen, preferring to eat out in the garden.

the last photo, if it ever uploads, shows our successful yam experiment. on a recent trip to istanbul, ali bought a yam and brought it back. i read in barbara damrosch’s garden primer that we ought to put it in a glass of water, which we duly did. before long, shoots emerged and we pulled these off and put them in bags of soil. they grew, and i planted them out in a new raised bed we had made. the result, below, is a wild tangle of vines with lovely, cup-shaped purple flowers. i have caught sight of a tuber below the earth, and it is not big, but we will not take them up for a while — not until the leaves die back. that is all from one yam, folks. one yam!