hello spring days

The first day of spring was delightful. Every morning this week it's been blustery. Cloudy and windy, the kind of wind that makes your bike zig across the street and makes your hair look like you've been.... er... out on a windy day in March.

It was like that this morning, but over all the wind you could still hear the birds singing their hearts out. It's a cacaphony of birdsong out there in the mornings when I go out for the newspaper.



The coffee shop was a quiet oasis this morning after such a noisy, windy, crisp bike ride in for our morning meeting.

After work Grady and I walked home. Why don't we walk more often? It's only about 30 minutes, and we get to peep into everyone's gardens to see what's growing. Zipping by on my bike, I tend to miss all the lovely details. Anyhow, we had a great walk home, and then we both went out to the backyard and worked in the garden until it was too dark to see anything.

Over the weekend I had spent a small fortune on plants, for a large bed I dug next to our back patio. It's a great spot, mostly sunny, and bordered on 2 sides by a fence. Here are some of my little plants lined up & waiting to go into the ground:



This tray has coral honeysuckle and green-headed coneflower. I also got spotted Joe Pye weed, butterly weed, Texas sage, Eastern phlox, and lots of other fun things.

I got them all into the bed tonight, though it was darkening quickly as I watered them in. By the time I got to spreading mulch, it was really too dark to see what I was doing. Tomorrow I'm going to go out there and find half of them buried, and the other half with no mulch at all.

It's also lettuce time:



Salad, anyone? It's finally time to start harvesting this beautiful lettuce. I think I planted about three times as much lettuce as last year, and am looking forward to having a big tasty salad for lunch most days this spring & summer. I've really been craving fresh garden lettuce -- the stuff from the grocery store is more unappealing all the time.

Now that we have so much more daylight after work, it's hard to find time to do the inside things I want to do, like cook dinner or work on my Crafters for Obama T-shirt. Somehow it must all get done though, because the campaign has arrived here in North Carolina, and I simply don't have a thing to wear. Unless I made a shirt from lettuce.... hmmm...