An evening in the garden

Almost every summer that I've been in Bloomington, I get the chance to take care of the garden of one of my professors while he and his wife go on vacation. They have a rather large garden for living smack dab in the middle of town and I love getting the chance to putter around in it. It's full of flowers in the front and vegetable and berry patches towards the back. It's always a bit (ok, a lot) overgrown and has a fair amount of weeds growing amongst the crops, but that doesn't seem to bother them.

For the past week and a half, I've been caring for the garden. Mostly watering it when the weather's dry and picking my share of fresh leaf lettuce. That's another one of the perks of garden-sitting: all the fresh produce I can eat! It's been 10 days of delicious salads. Today while I was out picking lettuce and broccoli and snap beans, I happened to turn towards the berry patch. And this is what I saw:
:) I wasn't expecting it, but the first batch of red raspberries had ripened. I picked about a quart and ate some along the way. So good!

After taking care of the garden, I decided to mow the their yard. They hadn't asked me to, but it was in dire need and I knew where they kept their lawn mower. It's a push mower... and by 'push' I mean that the only power you've got to work with is the pushing you put into it! And what followed is an hour and a half of the most satisfying manual labor that I've done in awhile. I ended up with grease and a matching set of blisters on my hands, and I loved every minute of it. There's no good way to describe the joy I got from it. It seriously made me want to offer to come mow their yard more often!

Where I come from