Gardening update and a passover miracle

It's been so long since I've updated and so much has grown since then!
Here are the peas and onions at 5 weeks and again at 7 weeks. The second picture was taken today, and there are also dill and cilantro seedlings sticking out of the ground (although they are hard to see). In about a week I'm going to plant some zucchini seedlings out there and the week after that 3 pepper seedlings will go back there too.

I recently repotted all the seedlings into larger containers with real (potting) soil. The seedlings grew pretty well the first few weeks (especially the zucchini seedlings, which I didn't even plant until about 4 weeks ago).



The cotyledons (The first set of leaves) had come up fine, but the first set of true leaves had started to peep out and then the plants kinda...stalled and didn't grow anymore. So last week I replanted the zucchini and a the red bell peppers into plastic cups with some potting soil in them (and holes cut in the bottom for drainage.) The true leaves on those peppers started growing like crazy (as you can see in the picture- the true leaves are the heart shaped leaves) so today I replanted the colored bell peppers in real dirt too (they had been growing in seed starting mix, which doesn't have a lot of nutrients- hence probably why they stalled after a while).
This time I put a bunch of seedlings into the same pots which will make it easier in a couple of weeks when I start to take them outside and inside for a week while I harden them off before planting them outside.


Meanwhile, on south side of the house I cleared out a big weed patch and planted dill, cilantro, 3 mammoth sunflowers (1 to block the view of our neighbor's front porch for each of our 3 windows), and a rosemary and oregano plant. Some peppers and basil will go out there in a few weeks too.

In this picture you can see the rosemary with a sunflower seedling on the top left. There's also dill seedlings growing there above the rosemary but they are pretty hard to see.

In passover news, on erev passover (day before passover) my dad called me while I was teaching a statistics class. So after class I called him back, and my mom picked up the phone. A passover miracle occurred! I talked to her for a whole 3 minutes before she made up an excuse to pass the phone to my dad. But I talked to my dad for a while, and then I talked to my youngest brother E for a while. The 3 of them were at a hotel for the first days of passover.

My brother E wants to be a professor and is going to be applying to Philosophy PhD programs in the Fall. It's funny, when I moved home for an uncomfortable summer between college and moving away to grad school (and out of my parents house for good) my mom said some mean thing about how I shouldn't talk to my youngest brother too much so I wouldn't be a bad influence on him "the way I was on my other brother" (who actually started eating non kosher meat before I did, so I think it was more the other way around- although we did go OTD at the same time and were very close at the time).

Anyways it seems like I did influence my youngest brother- to try to become a professor like me! And I got a text message from him yesterday saying he got an invitation from phi beta kappa and was that a good thing and should be join? (I answered "That's the most prestigious honors society in academia you should definitely join and congrats!"). I'm totally a GOOD influence! (I'm also in PBK).

It did sting a bit when my mom made up an excuse to hand off the phone to my dad after like 3 minutes on the phone. But at least I should be glad she answered my call at all? (she answered my dad's cell phone cause he was talking to someone on her cellphone) That was the first time I talked to her since I called my dad when my grandfather died in October, and she answered his phone then.

Oh and I almost forgot the actual passover miracle! So after I invited my brother to come visit whenever he put my dad back on the phone, and I figured, what the heck, I might as well invite him too. So I was like "hey if you ever are driving to Florida or something [my parents now have a condo in Florida that they inherited from my dead grandparents who lived there for about 20 years after they retired]. you should come visit us on the way. And my dad said that maybe he would drive down to Florida in December and visit us and my cousin's mom who lives in Atlanta on the way down.

So yeah! Possible actual visit to our house by my parents! (or at least my dad? Not clear). And classes are over for the semester, and finals are about to be taken starting tomorrow! And in a week and a half my brother and his new-ish girlfriend (they've been dating like 8 months, and I've never met her) are coming down to visit on his motorcycle. I don't know much about her but we are facebook friends, and she is on a roller derby tea, so from that I infer that she is awesome. Then after after that my inlaws are coming for a few days and I think we will do some of the touristy things around town with them. :)