Little Spring Garden

Well it's been a long, mild Knoxville winter, but in between thunderstorms the sun's out and things are looking up. For the past 8 spring seasons, I've lived in apartments with no sunlight, balconies, or backyards. This is the first chance I've had to plant anything close to a garden. There was a lot of talk all winter about tilling a huge plot in the back yard and growing rows of vegetables. Not so much action on that front, though. The yard's not flat, we rent this house, and it just wasn't really worth all that effort this year- particularly since I'm not even totally sure how to grow vegetables anyway.

So my 2009 container garden was born:


Now there are certain things that you can't really grow in a little pot, that I would have wanted to plant, but they're going to need to wait until next year (namely squashes and corn). I ventured down to the enormous Stanley's garden center in south Knoxville, and picked out some plants: yellow bell peppers, "sweet olive" grape tomatoes, "big rainbow" heirloom tomatoes, skinny eggplant, sweet basil, purple basil, sage, and chives. I rounded out the party with a big honkin' dill plant from a dude in a truck at the farmer's market this morning.

I'm pretty sure that the full size tomatoes aren't in big enough containers to really grow to their full potential. I'll be surprised if they take off. But the herbs are looking really great. The purple basil is the scene stealer. It's doubled in size in the first two weeks.


I have high hopes for the little eggplant though. And the grape tomatoes have taken off like crazy in two weeks. All the rain has helped I'm sure. Also, I think shoving three plants in one planter might have been overdoing it. But I have a feeling that it'll be a huge bush soon, and in a few weeks start shooting out more tiny tomatoes than I know what to do with.


I promise to take more pictures, especially when delicious food starts growing on my back stoop. Happy spring.

Puppy Goes to the Mountains

This weekend we took our new puppy, Seamus, on his first little outing in the woods. We packed up and headed out to Paint Creek Campground near Greeneville, TN on the northern edge of the Cherokee National Forest. Paint Creek turned out to be a nice little campground very far off the beaten path. I can't believe that anyone actually makes it out that far, but lo and behold it was filled up by dusk. The only method we have for finding these campgrounds is a guidebook. But it looked like many of the other folks there were locals. Particularly the burly ladies I borrowed a can opener from (terrible packing oversight).

The little bugger was a pretty good boy, save for some unnecessary barking at neighbors, and a 2 AM out-of-tent rest stop. He liked the falling leaves and his first sighting of a large body of water (no swimming lessons yet). He's only about 5 months old, but soon enough, he'll get his own backpack and be ready to hit the trail for real.

pizza! pizza!

I'm fully aware that with my decision to leave New York I have also forsaken the best pizza in the world. From what I understand it's futile to try and find great pizza in Knoxville, but on the other hand I've never met a pizza I didn't like.

My earliest pizza memory is sitting in the back seat of my mom's minivan after picking up two lovely cheese pizzas conveniently packaged together with paper and cardboard from the Little Caesar's across from Dobbin Center. It was my favorite, and damn was that ride home a long one.

For years I've been under the impression that Little Caesar's all but went under, existing only at the checkout of select K-Mart locations. Upon arrival in Knoxville, I found out that I was wrong. Little Caesar's still thrives in the American South! They've got a new gimmick now, you don't have to buy two pizzas at a time any more, but you also don't have to call ahead. They just constantly make pizzas, and they do enough business to have them "hot-n-ready" for pizza lovers with no foresight.


We got a pepperoni pizza, crazy bread, and even crazy sauce for $8.18. What a crazy meal it was. For the most part the actual pizza was just how I remembered it from childhood. There's sort of this thick shelf of cheese above the sauce, and it's prone to big burnt bubbles on top. So to all those I've discussed the extinction of Little Caesar's with, rejoice in the fact that I was wrong.