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i emptied my grow closet and handed away all my plants to my father this morning. he showed up with a few empty cardboard boxes and we loaded everything into the back of the car, to be safety transported to belmont where they will be hardened outside before finally planting them. a few will come back, so they can grow in my community garden plot. afterwards, my closet looked like the aftermath of a morning raid, empty of stock. all that's left were trays of wet gravel.

here's the breakdown of the take:

8 thai basil
2 morning glory
3 cypress vine
12 hot peppers
6 korean cucumbers
6 basil
11 tomatoes

i noticed the radishes have emerged in RB1. having never grown radishes before, i didn't realize they're famous for their fast germination/maturity rate; these were planted just 5 days. might we have edible radishes in just 4 weeks?

my father and i finally dug out the plot for raised bed 4 (RB4), the very last one. i normally don't get spring allergies but i was sneezing and blowing my nose like crazy. last night my throat was itchy, a sign that it's allergies instead of a cold. i took a benadryl before working. it cleared up my symptoms after a while. i wasn't drowsy (one of the more common side effects) but afterwards, when i was just sitting still, i felt really tired and sapped of energy.

RB4 was easier to dig out because we decided not to save any of the grass sods. we found a lot of small rocks and some tree roots. there was also a few dozen beetle grubs which i quickly dispatched. one thing i noticed during all our recent diggings is i never seem to see any earthworms. does that mean the soil isn't very good? i'll have to do some online research.

apart from finishing the raised bed, there was other things happening in the backyard. while i was busy digging out more dandelions, my father mowed the lawn for the first time this season. only a small part of it really needed to be mowed (the area where the dog usually pees, where the grass is really lush, until it becomes oversaturated with urine, in which case there's a semi-permanent yellow spot), but it wasn't too much effort with the gas mower to just give the lawn a uniform treatment. my parents and sister also moved a tall ladder that'd been leaning up against the maple tree for at least a few years. it was too tall to just lower without knocking somebody over, so in the end they just tipped it to an opened part of the lawn and let the ladder drop.

my mother was adamant that we go out for dinner tonight because she didn't want to cook and nobody else volunteered their cooking services. i would've been happy just ordering pizza, but she said since we had fried chicken yesterday, she wanted to eat something asian, preferably chinese. we finally decided on mulan in waltham, the sister restaurant of mulan in cambridge. unfortunately when we got there we realized they're not open on mondays. i said we should just get some takeout at the nearby wendy's but we settled on tree top thai cuisine on prospect street a few blocks away. we'd been to tree top before, back in may 2002. there was a couple sitting by the window who left soon after we arrived, leaving us the only customers. not that business was slow; they kept getting calls for takeout delivery and a few people came in to pickup their orders. the food was okay, but for the cost of my massaman curry dish (around $13) i could've bought all the necessary ingredients to make my own curry instead.