Spring Emergence

I feel like I'm breaking dormancy, much like my plants.

There's a lot going on.

My friend Val visited for 2 weeks and I haven't written about that. Eric and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary last week and I haven't written about that either. My dad turned 77 on Sunday and I have a post percolating in my head about him, too. (Warning! Tear jerker post imminent!)

Instead, I've been buying succulent plants and potting them up. Taking the ones I grew last year and over wintered inside (The ones that survived! Ack! White fly!) and potting them up in new containers, planting out the cuttings I'd taken last year and grew on and potting those up. I'm currently on a succulent bender.

Since I didn't grow a single plant from seed this year, I had to buy my annual tomato plants. They're sitting in pots on the deck as we speak. The weather has been too cold at night to put them into the raised beds...yet. I'm looking forward to getting the veggie garden started again. I even bought a few bell peppers and some strawberry plants and am going to try raising the strawberries in my giant pots on my deck instead of in the ground, where they will attempt to take over the garden. Again. Next up: putting a hardware cloth cylinder around each pot to keep the squirrels from absconding with my hard won strawberries!

I've been doing a little weeding. When I felt overwhelmed by all of the weeding I still needed to do, I took a break and cleaned up the deck. It collects a lot of dead leaves that blow in from the trees and assorted dead plant bits from my potting and repotting. We've even managed to eat a few meals out there already! I made a point of clearing the table off so that we could. The weather has finally started warming up, although it's been really windy the last couple of days.

I picked up 2 new bird feeders and actually filled them and set them out. I cleaned out the deck birdbath and filled that too. Then, when I heard the distinct sound of a hummingbird whizzing by, I immediately set up a sugar water feeder and set it out as well. I still haven't seen any, but at least I heard one and responded accordingly. I may wrap the feeder in red ribbon to make it more obvious to scouting hummers.

I was looking at the front xeric garden and noticing a lot of dead zones and determined that the sprinkler heads are messing up the watering pattern. Those may be xeric plants but they do like some water occasionally. I'll need to get Eric out there to replace some heads. I also plan on digging out the grass that is determined to grow in the middle of the bed and relocate some plants around the space. It's a ridiculous amount of work, but right now, the bed looks pretty hellish. Poor plants! That's what happens when Hatchet goes bye-bye for ~2 years. Ugh.

Today, I was determined to fill in the bed under the cherry tree some more, so I weeded it a bunch and then relocated some bleeding hearts from the backyard. They weren't looking too happy in the back there, so hopefully a change of scene will perk them up. Also, being sprayed with herbicide by the lawn guy didn't help them any!

Yeah, I decided to bite the bullet and hire an actual lawn guy. Eric's just not into gardening (or lawns) at all, so someone has to do the work I'm never going to get to. Also, after chatting with him for a bit, it turns out he can do paths and such, so I'm having him rip up the north side of the house, cap off the sprinkler heads in there and turn it into a work zone for me. Crushed gravel under foot, a small gate to keep out the crazy short people and a place to put all of my tools, wheelbarrows, potting bench and supplies! Suddenly the deck will stop looking quite so messy with the bench relocated.

You might be wondering where all of this crazed energy came from. Well, I finally saw my doc and got a blood draw that proved my thyroid was out of whack again and my vitamin D was really low. Surprise! (Yeah, you're so not surprised.) I'm also trying out vitamin Z, for a little while. It seems to be helping. The sunlight is definitely helping and I'm really starting to feel more like myself again.

Now if I can just keep the twins out of trouble while they're in the yard with me, I can get some real gardening done!

There might be be photos!

What have you been up to?