Spring Gardening Fun

Maggie loves to follow me around when I’m weeding.

This weekend was particularly satisfying because I got to spend most of it gardening. On Saturday Rob and I mowed and edged and ran the weedeater, which took up half the day but certainly resulted in a sharp-looking yard. I was on my hands and knees weeding most of the afternoon. (I like weeding because I can birdwatch at the same time . . . and dream about all the plants I still want to buy.) Near dark we planted a row of Silver Queen corn in our main vegetable bed and another row of cilantro behind the Nagami kumquat.

Our vegetables are doing great. The potato plants are so lush and bushy. We mulched them up high with leaves this weekend–so they have a kind of cozy look now. We have to make room for our zucchini seedlings, so we pulled out a few kale plants (behind the barn) and used the ruffly leaves to make kale chips. (They taste just like potato chips–except kale flavored.) The Swiss chard is still gorgeous with its hot pink stems, but our winter cilantro is really bolting now; it’s almost done. The Matt’s Wild Cherry tomatoes are growing like crazy; by summer they’ll get really viney and messy, so Rob built some bamboo trellises to help keep them in line.

I saw a good deal of the cats this weekend, which was awesome, of course. I doled out big piles of catnip to Maggie and Babs and Greg and watched them roll around and wrestle on the warm driveway (one of my favorite pastimes), and then I took a great picture of Greg with his tongue out. (He’d been cleaning himself, but then when he stopped he forgot to put his tongue away.)

Here’s what’s blooming in the yard right now: red buckeyes, blue-eyed grass, columbines, white wild indigo, crossvine, trumpet vine, golden ragwort, spiderwort, and pretty much all my heirloom roses (Rev d’Or, Marie Van Houtte, and Leonie Lamesch are standouts). The vine house (our little tin-roofed shelter at the edge of the driveway) is shrouded in heavy curtains of coral honeysuckle; the hummingbirds are in heaven.

Mom gave me this great owl statue for my birthday.


Here I am with my Katie Road Pink rose; it’s one of my favorites.