Now I Know It's Spring

I meant to clear just half of the rest of the garden yesterday but by the time I got the biggest tuft of quack grass dug out there wasn't that much of it left so I just kept going, and I'm very glad I did because look what I found.  The first three spears of asparagus (I know they're hard to see but, trust me, there's asparagus in that there photo) were hiding in the violets so I pulled out the violets around them very carefully and around the other places that I know asparagus pops up.  Eeee, asparagus!




Here's the weedy part of the garden before and then the whole cleared garden after.  Doesn't it look nice?  The green on the left in the lower photo is the blueberry bushes and the green at the top of the picture is where the daisies, echinacea, and asparagus grows.











The tulips up on the retaining wall are in full bloom.  These yellow and red ones are just gorgeous, aren't they?  There are still plenty of violets in the lawn blooming merrily away, at least until the lawn mowers arrive and do away with them.






I read in the newest issue of Birds & Blooms about saucer-style hummingbird feeders where the nectar reservoir is below the feeding ports so you can see the birds no matter where they're having a sip and it's harder for bees, wasps, and other birds without the nice long hummingbird tongues to have a drink.  The thought of keeping wasps and hornets away sent me to the birdseed store to see if they had one, and they did.  Too often I've noticed hornets chasing hummers away so we'll see how this works.  Still haven't seen one but we will soon, once the flowers start blooming.

 
Last night I realized that I was nearly out of cocoa butter cream when I went to slather it on my scaly legs after my shower so I went downstairs to my laboratory (aka the laundry area) to whip up a batch.  I put in a touch of grapefruit essential oil.  It's lovely and it smells so nice, plus my legs don't look like I have leprosy anymore.

May 7--Domenico di Michelino, Divine Comedy Enlightening Florence.

Imps dance over flames,
the damned haul rocks on their naked backs,
rain lashes huddled souls,
each circle seems worse than the last,
up or down doesn't matter,
every one offers its own exquisite nuance
of Hell's damnation.
~~~~~

Sorry about lapsing back into poetry but that painting was a bugger for my sleepy brain to decipher.  A couple hours ago I went to Stein's Gardens and brought home four straw bales, some fertilizer, and some soil.  From Home Depot I got a couple rolls of hardware cloth (which isn't cloth at all but half-inch wire mesh to keep gophers from tunneling into my bales; I had to insist that they had some when I asked where the fencing was, then I took it up to show the greeter and the manager-on-duty *sigh* and they weren't young kids either).  When I got home I drove right around to the back yard (I'm so glad I can do that, it saves hauling heavy things), got the wheelbarrow out of the shed, unrolled the hardware cloth, and got the bales positioned in the garden.  Tomorrow I'll pound in stakes to hold them in place, install soaker hoses, and sprinkle on fertilizer to start conditioning them.  I'm starting very late, a month later than I should have but it's been so cold and rainy I couldn't get out to clear out the garden.  I'll put weed barrier on the ground around and between the bales and cover it with newspaper to keep weeds down.  I'm excited about gardening for the first time in years.  This is a good thing, plus I've easily "made my steps" every day for the last three days. Yay, me!
--Barbara