It’s spring, it’s spring, it’s spring!

Now I know what y’all are saying, “Margaret, it’s only January! It’s nowhere near spring yet!”

Well duh! I’m not lacking in any time sense. But I’m a gardener, I march to the beat of a different drummer.

And so on a day when I can spend much of the morning and early parts of the afternoon out playing in my garden, I can officially declare it spring.
The roses are now pruned. The memorial rose (a climber) we planted for Baird the summer after she died is now at least somewhat constrained so that it’s growing horizontally along the trellis instead of straight vertically and/or up on to the roof. The bulb bed is weeded and the winter’s leaf debris has been raked out. The bulbs are even coming up so within a few weeks I’ll have daffodils, tulips, crocuses, and (best of all) a large number of hyacinths. I even cleaned the weeds and grass starts out of the rock bed around my worm bin although it’s wasted effort. The grass will be back in a very short period of time unless we actually get it together this spring and put in the concrete pad we’ve been talking about (more on that as it develops, we’ve got some REALLY cool plans). I dug up half a bucketful of dandelions out of the yard which is, I have to say, a great deal easier in the spring after it has rained all winter than it is in the summer when the yard is composed of baked clay and freakin’ bedrock. I also managed to give haircuts to two of the six lavender bushes that live in the back yard. The muck bucket that I was using to pick up debris so that I can take it around front to the yard waste container took on a most marvelous fragrance with the lavender prunings, the lime balm prunings, and the mint prunings.

Soon I’m going to have to do a major job on my rosemary bush. I haven’t managed to get my pruning shears sharpened yet so I’m not going to be able to do anything with the rosemary or the rhododendrons until that happens.

Andrew even put up my Christmas lizards on the garden shed (thanks Matt & Shannon!)

The lettuces I planted last fall are still in the garden. A little frost blasted, but present nonetheless. We might actually have some real lettuce when it warms up again. The beets……. well, I’ve never really had any luck with beets.

So it’s officially spring.

Happy spring everybody, it’s been a long dark winter.