A Great Week for Gardening!

It's been a challenging week for communications, but the people at Sprint and Dell have that under control....the new phone is in hand, spending hours reentering numbers, the new computer on its way. On the other hand, what an awesome week for gardening! Hovering around 80 degrees all week, mostly sunny, then some showers started today. It's hard to believe we were close to freezing just a few weeks ago! I've been able to get a ton of things done at the big house, doing the final pre-season "primping." The summer containers are full, we're getting blisters from pruning shears, the annuals are in, and things are just starting to explode in the garden!

The irises and peonies are loving this weather! Here are a few shots from this morning....unfortunately I don't know the cultivars of any of these beauties!

What is up with the Weather???

Today started very cold, but by midafternoon was in the high 60's and absolutely glorious! I'm finally convinced that spring is here to stay, after the brief snow showers yesterday afternoon.
Truly, if someone had been out of town for the past two days, they would never have believed that it was that cold.

Fortunately it didn't get "crazy cold" until around 5 AM where I live and work, so we were spared a lot of freeze damage. We were also lucky to have very high winds for the past couple of days, which doesn't allow the frost to settle. I was really afraid for the budded peonies and hydrangeas, but all looked really good this morning.

At the Big House garden, we were able to shut the heat off in the greenhouse and actually leave the door slightly ajar. Some of the most tender things like coleus, tomatoes, and the like are still tucked into the warmest corners, but it's time for some of the sturdier plants to start getting used to being outdoors. In the middle of the afternoon, the exhaust fans came on, indicating it was hitting 90 degrees in the greenhouse for the first time in months!

I was concerned about some of the new roses that got planted last week, but my "rose lady" thought they would be just fine, and she was right on the mark! The Abraham Darby's that went in last week (they had been in heated greenhouses at the grower until that point) are just covered with huge super fragrant blossoms. It's been such an interesting year with weather, I'm still amazed at the combination of late daffodils, late camellias and early roses all blooming at the same time. The combination of fragrances is really overwhelming, with the HEAVY fragrance of the hollies mixed with the roses. Add in the sight of Eastern Bluebird, Goldfinches and Cardinals all at the same cluster of feeders, and it's the icing on the cake!

Lastly, since I know you're all dying to know, Favorite Tree (doublefile viburnum) came through the freeze without a blemish....you can all relax and get on with your day!

A Bit of Spring Cleaning

After a weekend of cold drizzly rain (which we desperately needed), it was a treat to be in the garden today in the warm sun. It got into the high 60's, and was the perfect day to do some "spring cleaning" in the vegetable garden and the big perennial beds. Can you believe we're only a month from planting summer annuals?

The blueberries are positively covered with blooms, which are pretty in the walled garden, since everything else there is either still dormant or just starting to grow for spring.

I managed to pull out some of the winter cabbages, which had started to bolt with this warm weather, and are developing that funky odor that occurs when they start their decline. Time to move the last of the "Antique Shades" pansies from the nursery area to the displays at the front of the house, since it still needs to look good for another month before the spring things arrive. They are the perfect color for the brick of the house, but a challenging cultivar that needs lots of babying.

Took the broom to the creeping fig that covers the wall in the garden; it starts to look pretty ratty at this time of year, so the broom makes quick work of brushing away the dead leaves, exposing the new growth; it was exciting to have to tiptoe through the spears of asparagus that have just started popping up in the past couple of days! One of the luxuries of being the gardener is standing in the garden, in the silence, in the sun, eating the first stalk of the season's asparagus......

I was raking away the last of the autumn leaves from the vegetable beds (we leave a light covering there for the winter), and discovered the tiny little shoots of sweetpeas around the base of the tuteurs....I can't wait to see them start racing up the slats in the next couple of weeks!

Across the gravel walkway, the peonies are showing their heads (one in a particularly hot spot is about six inches high already), so I got to put out their cages for another spring show. Peonies always make me smile, thinking of my grandmother calling them "Pee-OH-nies" with the New York accent that still came through, even 70 years after leaving her childhood home.

I finished my day giving a haircut to the "Sunny Yellow" Knockout Roses that arrived a few weeks ago, grooming them to go into containers at the pool in a few weeks. There is something magical about spring, when you can literally watch things grow right in front of your eyes!

Leave the dreaded leaf blowers and power mowers in the garage for just another week! Sit back and enjoy the simplicity of the spring garden.....and look for those first spears of asparagus!

PS....The sakurafubuki is getting closer!