It’s all about the garden: what’s going on in April at our place

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And yes, there is treasure at the end of that rainbow. More about that later, though.

I love, love, love this time of year. I want to hug spring. I’d marry spring, if I weren’t already a married woman. I might even posit that springtime is my favorite season, but one of you would undoubtedly remind me that I say that about autumn every year. Or even winter, at least during the first few, brisky-fresh, snowy days. Until it drags on for ten years, or so it seems by February. I also adore summer, at least certain days, before the humidity, the heat, and the bugs get tiresome.

Spring is it, folks. 🙂

Every day seems a gift in spring. I’m not the only one in a hurry. Spring is in a hurry to get stuff leafed out and budded out and blossomed out and well, just out there. Every day, I’m anxious to get outside to see what’s new. I know. I need to get out more. (I hear that all the time.)

This is the time of year when I can’t really afford to go out of town for more than a day or two. We are doing a lot of planting–in the garden proper, in the hoop house, and in flower beds all over the blessed place. Everything is popping out and there is growth and blossoming and new buds and fruit tree blossoms to admire. Daily walks to take it all in are necessary. We find shells from songbirds’ eggs on our walks, and take note of where the thistles (*sigh*) and new dock weeds (*doublesigh*) are coming up this year. I start to take a spade with me on my walks, so I can pause and dig up the thistle plants as I see them.

And finally, after a long wait and several days of wind, it rains. And if we were behind before the rain, after the rain we are up to the tips of our noses in catch-up mode. I’m-behind-suddenly mode. Somebody-slow-this-spring-thing-down-mode, else it’ll be summer! All green things jump ahead in their growth overnight.

But on a rainy day, it’s a snug and comforting feeling to not be able to get into the vegetable gardens because, well, they are thick in mud. If I’m feeling particularly Momish (this is one of my Mom’s tricks) I’ll go out in a raincoat and pull weeds from the flower beds after (or during) a rain, because that’s when the weeds pull easily.

There’s such satisfaction in pulling weeds easily, isn’t there?

Pulled weeds make excellent mulch, by the way, to keep other weeds from germinating, and to nourish the soil. This spring, since I’m doing some commercial growing, I’ll probably be standing on my back porch on rainy days, watching the rain and potting up hundreds of seedlings from tiny plugs to bigger pots, so they can have another week or two of growth, before I plant them out in the garden. Either that, or I’ll be in the hoop house with Mack, planting another bed of peppers or eggplants or nasturtiums. Or both. One first, and then the other. 🙂 It all is happy work to me.

It is a glorious time of year, when that persistent itch of mine, six months’ worth of longing-to-be-outside actually can be scratched. So if you need me, don’t call the house. I won’t be inside. And I more than likely won’t have my ‘phone on me, either. 🙂 Sorry, honey. *wincing*

Oh, yeah. The whole reason I started this post was to share a few pictures. So I’ll get to them, without any more yakking.

But first: I meant to share these pictures in my earlier post about my granddaughters. So, please permit me a couple of proud grandma pictures.

My granddaughter Anya is going to be a famous artist like her papa. Here she is adding a new drawing to the refrigerator art display. She draws constantly. 🙂

I particularly like this lovely young lady, with the side-swept hairstyle, coyly hiding one eye.

Okay, (and thank you for letting me do that) now on to the pictures of our place. I could post dozens, but I’ll rein myself in. I’ll do another post like this next week, and possibly the next, to catch up. (See? Catch-up mode!)

This is what happens when we have a thunderstorm: after it stops, and the skies begin to clear, we are drawn outside by the peculiarly beautiful light, and we walk around with our mouths hanging open. Just looking. The evening that I took these photos, I was out by myself for ten minutes before Mack joined me.

And then I dashed in to get my camera, natch’.

Having had breastfed six babies into toddlerhood, I always feel a peculiar kinship with mammatus clouds like these.

You nursing mothers will understand this. 🙂

Isn’t it funny, how we are influenced by other people’s gardening choices? At least I am. Of course, who wouldn’t be influenced by my mother’s flower beds? They are the stuff of legends, in their size, scope and creativity. You should see them. My mom has taken to planting lots of alliums in her flower gardens, and I admire them so much that I planted some allium bulbs myself (pictured above) last fall. I love the look of these fat, bulging flower buds and can’t wait to see them bloom!

Another plant-loving friend gave me a box full of bulbs last fall, and I planted them willy-nilly all through the season. Now I’ve got surprises coming up, everywhere, because I don’t even remember where all or what all I planted! Bless my bad memory! Serendipity all around!Here are more surprises from that rash of bulb-planting: tiny yellow tulips, tightly wrapped against the stormy weather on this evening. I think I’d call these “Blushing Maidens,” if I were in charge of naming them.

Here’s an astonishing fact that you might find difficult to swallow: There were no flowers and very few trees when we moved out to our place fifteen years ago. Children had never lived here, either. Isn’t that funny? We changed things abruptly, and immediately and thoroughly. It was a very quiet, tidy place before we came. Now it’s fully the opposite.

Our house is still groaning over it all.

Back to my Mom–being an enthusiastic planter and grower of all things–she couldn’t stand the barren, lava-rock-lined flower beds (there were no flowers, just lava rock) that flanked our house. So she brought out this darling little dogwood tree that first summer. She and the kids cleaned out this one flower bed for me in the front of the house. I think it was her birthday present to me that year, and she planted the tiny dogwood tree right in the middle of it. I remember I was inside at the time, unpacking boxes with my little toddler Amalia “helping.” My, my, how things change and how quickly they do, too, eh?

The diminutive dogwood has grown very slowly, and hasn’t looked very happy about where it was planted, ever since, almost like it hadn’t decided whether it wanted to live or die. Then a year or two ago, it put out one tentative flower, or possibly two. I was in raptures. “Yes, live! Please live!” I encouraged it. We had planted flowers all around it, for company and beauty and encouragement. And because we couldn’t not plant flowers. It is in our DNA.

This year the little tree has decided–after 15 years of ‘meh’ness–that it is happy where it is, after all. It is (to coin a phrase) finally content to bloom where it was planted.

A lesson for us all, Gentle Reader, a lesson for us all. Hopefully it doesn’t take most of us a decade and a half to come to this realization that it’s okay to be content with where we are, and what we have. Who we are with. (Generally speaking, of course.)

This isn’t the best photo of this snowball bush that I’ve ever taken, but the wind was stirring it just enough . . . I’ll take more next week, when the snowballs are white and fat, and still. But I love it. Do you have a snowball bush? You probably oughta. They are delightful.

The inside of my hoop house is still fairly neat and orderly, but it won’t stay that way. You see that I’ve got two lines of closely-planted heirloom tomatoes on the right (with drip tape set up for watering, and mulch thickly applied) and trays of more plants to go in this week—peppers, eggplants, edible flowers, and more and more heirloom tomatoes, a few summer squash—I’m already looking for more space, as is my wont. Wishing I had a second hoop house this size, honestly, but please don’t tell hubby that. His head is likely to explode, and there goes my tidy hoop house.

By the way, if you are in the area, I’ll be selling my extra heirloom tomato plants very soon. Stay posted!!

We’ve been eating these gourmet lettuces and greens for lunch every day; they are so good! The deer netting to the left is to keep my chickens from enjoying them, too.

This photo is for my Dad. 🙂 I think I’m going to have the first ones this year, Dad, I love you.

We watch the western skies for incoming weather, since most of the weather in our area blows in from the west. Thankfully, we’ve got a nice sloping hill to the west, on which to sit in the evenings and watch the weather and the sunsets. The grazing deer and occasional buffalo. Just joking about the buffalo. The neighbor’s black Angus steer are very picturesque, though.

Happy springtime to you, Gentle Reader, if you are reading from our hemisphere, where spring is bursting out all over.

Thanks for popping by, dear one, and I’d just love it if you left a comment or had a couple seconds to share this post. It’s a hug back, as it were. 🙂

Thank you again, and many *hugs* to you, yours, and to all your springtime endeavours!

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