Frabulous joys

This morning, as we stepped out of the house into bright sunshine, there was a guy with his toddler daughter, pointing out our snowdrops saying "... the FIRST flowers of the season". It was a good way to start the day.

Who's next?

Traditionally, I think the pickwicks are up immediately after the zwanenburg bronzes. However, this is what the most mature of the pickwicks looks like.

And this is what I found in the front this morning. I think we've got a winning snowdrop, here. I should put snowdrops in the side; they'd be up and at 'em in February!

By the way, I took those photographs through sleet, which had previously been hail and will likely be snow later. Do I care? No. It is spring ... the crocuses don't lie.

Hello, yellow!

There have been hints of things growing once again in the side and front yards. Little tiny bud-noses poke out of the ground here and there.

Some are silly optimists who spring out of the earth in the fall and then spend the winter getting abused.

Some are just starting, like the not-bent-over stalks in the photo above.

Since today is the compost collection day around here and I had seen snowdrop buds elsewhere in town yesterday, I thought I might lift a few of the xmas tree boughs and see if anyone was, y'know, maybe about to flower.

I found a lovely pale green hyacinth starting beneath the piles.

The sweary one and I have been discussing what my requirements are for the garden starting on March 4. I say: yellow showing by that day and I'm a happy lady. The wonderful early Zwanenburg Bronze don't have to be open by then but showing yellow and I'm a happy lady.

Well, I am a happy lady. It's only March 2! They've got 2 free days to frolic in what hopefully will be sunshine. It was snowing ever so lightly as I took these photos, but it's supposed to improve as the week wears on.

Welcome back, garden! I'm looking forward to a good season with you this time around.

Yellow at work

I don't think that I've confessed, yet, to having purchased another little pot of bulbs. They're so pleasing, and not terribly expensive on the scale of, say, cut flowers. They're $4 for a 4" pot. Seems reasonable to me. This time: daffodils.

The office tulips are coming out, but they are very top heavy.

One tulip is fully open.

One tulip I despair of ever opening. It looks too scrunched up to ever make it.

At my door, the leaves are falling

It's another stunning fall day out there. On Friday, the temperatures dropped and we had our first frost (that's Oct 30, 2009, for those of you keeping track). We walked to work through the public gardens, drinking in the thick air and admiring the frost-steam coiling off every surface the sun touched.

Our maple tree is still dropping leaves like they're going out of fashion, which of course they are. Last night it was very windy. I went out in the afternoon to get a composterful of leaves off the ground and within a half hour there was very little to show that I'd done the raking at all. It rained like crazy after that, but fortunately it held out until after the trick-or-treating was done. We had a grand total of 8 trick-or-treaters and that's including the two adults in costumes who came round collecting canned goods for the food bank.

At the market, between picking up fresh eggs and apple cider I passed some beautiful bulbs for sale and thought about picking some up. I want to try my hand at forcing some time and I haven't added any bulbs to the garden this year. But I thought that I was being silly: When would I have time or opportunity to put bulbs in the ground when it was already nearly November? But I absolutely had time, opportunity and motivation yesterday and today is nearly as perfect a gardening day. I shouldn't have dismissed the idea so quickly. Ah, well.

Whoops!

I pulled up these guys, thinking that they were grass. 

Are they baby bulbs?  

The Nick of Time

Yesterday's industriousness came just in the nick of time.  Last night we had a generous dollop of snow.

The work of yesterday was to take this

and this (front yard)

and this (side yard)

and turn it into this (front yard)

and this (side yard).

The work of mother nature last night was to take that and turn it into this (front)

and this (side).  

The blizzard was what the weatherman calls a "classic nor'easter".  We can tell that because our front walk is cleared by the howling wind and our side walk gets a drift to make up for it.  The houses across the street got drifts on their front walks and they have beautiful (dramatic) cakes of snow all over the fronts of the houses, too.  

There is a certain magic encapsulated in those photographs which is not obvious to the casual observer, but in the days before we had blow-in insulation, snow never built up against the side of the house.  It would always melt for a few inches around the perimeter.  For me, there are few more trenchant illustrations of how wonderfully effective the insulating has been.  (Of course, the 15% reduction in our oil use is nice, too.... probably it will be an even greater reduction this winter because we've done a little more sealing and we're not keeping the house as warm as we did last year.)

The sweary one's brother came over yesterday and saw the lovely corkscrew tree trunk and was clearly appalled.  "What happened to your tree?"  We tried to explain, but I think that as a non-gardener he left perplexed.  I hope the boughs are doing good service protecting the following from the perils of the wind and snow.  I'm also hoping that the darkness will convince them (finally) to give it a rest.  There are an awful lot of little shoots popping out of the dirt.

Last, but not least, let's hope 2009 is a good year filled with good growth.  

Note(s) to self

I'm pretty sure this happened last year, but one of the huge advantages of the blog is that I now have a place to write these things down so I can check year by year.   The note is that the bulbs I planted a few weeks ago are sprouting.  It makes me very nervous.  I want them to survive what will no doubt be a cold and unfriendly winter.  They shouldn't be putting their precious juices into tender green shoots which will be destroyed when the weather goes below zero this week.  But, like I said, I am pretty sure this happened last year, too.  Maybe it'll be alright.  

I planted the last of the bulbs yesterday, mostly in a very crowded planting next to the basement window:

That's not an art shot, I know, but it does show me where they're planted and I used old blog entries to see where there were no bulbs already.  I'm telling ya, this blogging thing isn't bad.

But for it to be effective, I should probably keep honest about what things really look like.  

That's the front, as yet uncleared.  I might leave the leaves because I don't think there are any maple leaves in that pile.  Plus, if I clear the sidewalk and let the mulch pile higher on the bed, maybe more people will stick to the sidewalk and leave the bed to coddle bulbs. 

I had a hopefully good idea about what to do with the side front.  It is completely weed and tall-grass overgrown with no plan for redemption ... until now.  That can be where the herbs run rampant!  It can be a mint patch, no probs.  It doesn't really connect to anything.  There are a couple of shrubs which are large enough to look after themselves (probably).  If I fill it with mint then it will look after itself.  I could put in a few kinds, maybe, but it's not in a spot I would eat from.  I just want something healthy and deliberate to be growing there instead of the disaster it is now.  

Autumn Clean-Up

Yesterday, I raked leaves and put them into bags.  After finishing clearing the "lawn" (don't worry, "clearing" should have been in quotes, too, as of this morning), I turned around and saw the leaf-littered side yard and decided to tackle it right away.  Usually I just let it sit and be leafy all winter long, on the theory that the leaves are mulch and prevent weeds from taking an early hold in the spring and keep the ground moist if there's a dry spell.  But there's this tar spot thing and I thought I couldn't leave them be.  

So, I put on some thick gloves and clawed around the base of all my plants.  It was quite nice sometimes and quite nasty at others.  The thyme greeted me with a lovely scent which lingered in the air.  I thought the lavender would be even nicer, but it had been beset by some kind of mushroom which then rotted at its base, so the lavender smell was overpowered by that dusty fusty musty mushroom smell.  That became quite familiar to me.  There were a lot of those little nasty spheres which actually turn into a sinister black powder when they decay.  Nothing eats them, so I am quite certain that they are very bad.

After the leaves that had fallen from the trees were taken care of, the side still looked a bit ragged.  The glads, irises and daylilies were all past their peaks, but still somewhat clinging to life through a few yellowing spears.  I got rid of the worst of the yellows and then cut the rest short.  I don't think there is time for real new growth before the winter and hopefully they'll concentrate on their bulbs for the rest of the year.  

I pulled up the last of the dead marigolds and zinnias, the dead nasturtiums and the gone (never really arrived, actually) scarlet runner.  I left the gazanias, of course.  I can spare another few hours to clean them out when the time comes.  I can't believe they're still going.  When I got them, I said "Hopefully, they'll last for a while".  Five months is, indeed, a while.  I'm more than slightly satisfied.

I'll take pictures later, after I've put in the last of the bulbs.  Yes, that's right.  I haven't finished planting those bulbs.  Sigh.

iris

I got more of the bulb irises.  It's confirmation that the things I couldn't remember  really are irises grown from bulbs.  I must have put them in and completely forgotten about them.  This time, I have a record.  They're called joyce and they're blue.  I hope they're a blue that works well with the house.  I know from the yellow ones that they look really, really silly laid out in a grid, so I'll do something else this time.  

daffodils

The daffodils are quite expensive and I'm not really sure what kinds I would like best.  So, I only (hah! "only") got two dozen. 

I chose the white, impressive Mount Hood, which I have one of already and it stands out beautifully in the garden.

I got Birma daffodils, which have yellow petals and white trumpets.  Many of the birma bulbs were split.  I am hoping that will translate to more daffodils.  

The bulbs are mighty and impressive.  They look like something you'd use to kill a science fiction creature, possibly the science fiction creature itself.

tulips

Not too many different kinds of tulips and not too many tulip bulbs.  They're pretty and bright and intense, but people take them and they're more expensive than crocuses, which are also pretty and people don't take them.  

I tried to match them to the house.  This is probably stupid, but I did it.  I got a deep bronzy-golden kind called cairo, and a blue one called aimiable blue.  

fritillaries

Fritillaries are a new thing for us.  I think they're quite pretty, with their little delicate op-art petals.  We'll see if they fit in with the rest of the flowers.  There are only a dozen in this year's batch.

They have interestingly different bulbs.  They're not as onion-like as the others, nor as very string-papery as the crocuses.  

garlic

We are not at all certain that there is any real difference between the garlic bulbs that we get at the store to cook with and the garlic bulbs that we get at the seed store for planting.  Who cares?  We will plant these.  There are three bulbs because the garlic did so well in the shade at the plot that I thought it might be worth trying it in the shade in the back of the house.  I am quite in love with the idea of growing edible things at home, too.  

crocus

The crocus situation is as follows:  I love crocuses.  I love their sweet little blooms so early in the spring.  I love the brave way they pop out of the still-icy earth.  They win every prize.

This summer, my prized pickwicks seem to have given up the ghost.  At least, I doubt that the bulbs that gave me such lovely flowers this year, followed by seed pods, will have much left in them to make new flowers again next year.  I am pretty sure that seed pods are a bad sign.  So I went out and got plenty of crocus bulbs.  They're also deliciously cheap.  On the order of $4 per dozen.  I can get behind mass plantings under those circumstances.

There are Golden Yellow crocuses in the bundle.  They're hopefully going to come out a nice deep yellow. 

There are Peter Pan crocuses, which are white and only white.

There are Blue Pearl crocuses, which look white to me, but apparently count as blue because they have a sort of blue tinting at the base of the petals.  

allium

They say that they are purple, but they looked pink to me.  They're not spectacular and huge, but for a first try with allium, I thought this would do.  They were so cheap, I nearly went for 50 but then I noticed that they needed to be 3 inches apart and I don't have room for 50 ANYTHINGS that are 3 inches apart so that settled that.

Allium is latin for garlic in my world.  There is a (quite lovely) polyphonic song called "Spem in Alum" (I think).  In my family, it's called "Spam in Garlic".  We do have our fun, don't we.

Busy day

Actual gardening-type activity occurred today!  Not actual gardening, mind you.  But ... there was lots and lots of gardening shopping.

We went out to a big box store and got soil and planks to turn the front yard into something with more nutrients and fewer people walking through it. 

We went to our local seed store and got lots and lots and lots of bulbs.  I mean, lots.  It was a good haul.

Many posts to follow, all about the different types of bulbs.