We dine alfesco

On our way home from Minnesota this week, tired and sad and wrung out, we stopped on our side of Des Moines at this organic farm restaurant. It was ... not what I expected, although it was perfectly clean and the food was delicious. We were also the only customers, and the outside dining option was a long picnic table under a tree. While we waited, the kids wandered around to check out the free-range chickens (who were yummy, I must confess) and the crops. This is the part where it got confusing, since it seemed very much like what a working farm is not. There were plants, but they were planted in PVC pipe (four feet off the ground, with soil filling the pipe, as near as I could tell) or in the openings in cinder blocks which were lined up neatly along the driveway. They didn't feel really like crops as much as - garden gone wild. The establishment was also apparently a CSA (for Community Supported Agriculture, where you buy a share upfront and get produce all summer long.) Maybe we didn't get a good enough look at what was going on, or we were just too tired to properly appreciate how innovative their agriculture was, but we felt somewhat confused by it all. However, the food was so much better than anything we could have scavaged for ourselves from a fast food place, and the kids were happy to scamper around taking pictures of things they saw. Grace reported that "approximately 3/4 of the tomato plants had little green tomatos already," which is promising indeed!

Next up: a blog about Grace's dance rehearsal (a mere 5.5 hours of non-stop fun!) that will include the words "bustier" and "vampire teeth" to describe one number.