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"I have a pea!" -- MLK (Mrs Linda Kennedy)

LK burst through the door yesterday with a wide grin on her face.

"Donald," she said excitedy, "we have a pea!"

Now, because I often burst through that door yelling, "I have to pee!" I at first misunderstood her. But then I realized what she was saying. Our garden was starting to make some food for us.

It should. We have put more work into growing our own veggies than just about any of the other 30 or 40 projects we embraced enthusiastically for a week or two. You know about moving the dirt to set up the bed, but since then we have each spent hours every day planting, thinning, pruning, transplanting seedlings, watering, staking and - as often as not - just standing there admiring our agricultural skills and trying to convince ourselves we really can notice a difference from day to day.

This is a bit surprising to me. It's not like we left Sydney to move to a farm. Our house is in a suburban cul-de-sac near the beach. Real farms are a good 7 miles away.  But for some reason, LK and  I have it in our heads that we are starring in the sequel to Green Acres - with the very surprising difference that both of us have chosen the Eddie Albert role and LK shows no interest in reprising a latter-day Eva Gabor.

The (Patient) Big Green Egg

And it's not just backyard farming. We're pretty much going the whole Nine Green Acres Yards. We are now baking our own bread a couple of times a week and LK has bought a new sewing machine and some quilting kits.

Yesterday we discussed whether we should make some of our own cheese, and the Big Green Egg is waiting patiently for us to begin making our own sausages and smoking them. (Yes, that's the two-year-old Big Green Egg, and when I say it is waiting patiently, I mean very patiently.)

The Herbal Deck

We love roasting chickens now so we can use the carcass the next day to make our own stock, which is especially rich in flavor because I use the parsley, thyme, rosemary, bay leaves and tarragon that LK is growing on the deck. Those are the herbs, by the way, which LK visits first thing every morning. "They're looking good," she will report or, less happily, "I'm a little worried about some of the basil." That's a worry, of course, because LK needs it to make her own pesto.

Growing your own does bring us back to the New Age Victory Garden out back. That has more than its fair share of great moments -- like this morning when LK rushed in the door and told me excitedly, "We have a second pea plant with a pod!"

"I have another pea!"