Planting at Last

I am enjoying a weekend with two unencumbered days. After I did an hour of rotten rock path restoration, my dog Walter and I took a short trip to the dump and a long trip to Ellsworth. I bought goose food and groceries and the beginnings of the plant list I assembled all winter long: a little flat of portulaca, two bush honeysuckles, a tiger eye sumac and a Joe Pye weed. The portulaca went into the hanging planter on the deck, the Joe Pye weed was installed near the pond, the honeysuckles went into last year’s salvaged bed near the echinacea, and the sumac was given its own nook within which to grow six feet tall and six feet wide. There was rain last night and fog now, I will actually water today to "drive" the water further into the ground. Plants and paths will get a much needed drink. The weather has been dry with temperatures locked into a 40 degree low-60 degree high pattern. I haven't planted my seeds because I have been concerned about soil temperatures as well as the need to water tender seedlings. Now of course I am itching to put everything into the ground. We'll see how much restraint I exercise through this day, good thing I literally have a ton of rotten rock that I can play with. 

First Flowers

Granted these are "store-bought" but they are flowers on my deck, daffodils scheduled to pop open tomorrow, coltsfoot blooming along the roadside. This is the year of the gourd, I have over thirty seedlings under the grow light. Last year was the year of the moonflower and that species failed miserably in every condition I offered (sun, shade, south, north, dry, moist....). I saw frost on the roof two nights ago, I am not thinking frost is behind us. But I am knowing that I raked the last of the snowbank into oblivion on Sunday and the perennial foliage increases exponentially with each passing day.

Hiatus

Never mind the five inches of snow that fell in one night the second week of April. The last thirty days are a memory. All the waiting is a memory. I bought violas home today and planted them. I brought horse manure home today and planted that too. Never mind that I had to skirt a snowbank in order to get to where I wanted the horse manure to be. When will that snowbank be a memory? My guess is April 30. This is a list of what I can see growing: daffodils, iris, ladies' mantle, yarrow, columbine, lupine, day lilies, sedum, Shasta daisies. Small - yes. Alive - yes. Alive is all that counts.

Thaw

Thirty-four degrees feels like a whole lot of degrees, especially when the degrees are accompanied by zero precipitation. The geese were inspired to walk up the trail to the garden shed. Perhaps they imagined they might find bits of growing vegetation. No such luck. But there is some small degree of thaw - the snow on the roof of the shed, and on my house, recedes a bit further each day. I'm soaking Passiflora incarnata seeds. I brought the potting soil indoors from the shed, wanting the soil to change from a frozen block to a friable and plant-able substance. The chickadees are singing their Spring tune. The time changed last night. It's all slow but it's all change.

Recored Breaking Be Damned

I'm done with breaking winter records and so is my crazy bougainvillea. Deer Isle and my garden have been the recipients of over 6 feet of snow within the past month. There have also been record-breaking cold temperatures, I don't want to know any of the details about them. If I ignore the facts, perhaps less plants will die, that is my strategy. This is a picture of my crazy bougainvillea also in the act of ignoring and beginning to bloom in my studio despite the pile of snow in the outdoors (the pile is taller than me). I have read that snow is poor man's fertilizer - that the snow captures nitrogen from the atmosphere as it falls, and I can look forward to a lush-er season because of the snow. I therefore anticipate a veritable jungle, given the depth of "nitrogen" on the gardens.

2015 Seed Order

Here are the only seeds I plan to buy (someone should remind me in June that I said that in February). They arrived Saturday - I did not crop the dish or the computer out of the picture so that perhaps one can discern that seeds are all 1/4 lb. packets. Shady Woodland Mixture, Beneficial Insect Attractant Mixture, Bee Feed Mixture, Butterfly and Hummingbird Mixture, Xeriscape Mixture Eastern US... "Mixture" is clearly the operative word. My plan is to sow them mid-May, water as needed for a few weeks and see which things germinate/grow/survive the slugs and deer, etc. and which survivors attract local pollinators. Survivors/Attractors get kin.

Reflecting

Because there is a new blizzard and because I have read through my current seed catalogs to the point that the catalogs themselves are tired, I have been looking at pictures of my property and the progress. Once upon a time, there was a cabin, a neglected trailer next to the cabin, and a pond. No walkways, no gardens - although there was a significant amount of Comptonia proclaiming that sweet plants could indeed live here. This Google Earth photo says so much to me: the trailer is replaced by the main pollinator garden, there is an interlocking series of paths to the pond, to the goose Palace, to the rhododendron gardens, through the woods (plural), to the deer feeding station. Every inch of path was built with cardboard and gravel and a wheelbarrow. In the beginning, the driveway was a series of holes fringed by long reaching fingers of alders. No longer. The ankle-biting blackberry vine ground cover is replaced by a hundred other plants that welcome both my ankles and a host of helpful invertebrates. So much has changed. I will hold tight to the thought that the property is all resting under the newest blanket of snow, waiting to explode into green once again.