The weather here has been absolutely gorgeous. Cool, sunny, blue-sky days are followed by crisp, clear, starry nights. You couldn't ask for anything better. Being outdoors all day has been a joy and the best part of all this time off at home.
The yard has never looked better. Everything is neat and trimmed, weeded and mown. The porch has been thoroughly cleaned. I even mopped it with Fabuloso (of course I thought of Mary!) and the tile floor smelled nice afterward and feels good on bare feet. All of our houseplants have gone out there to spend the next few months, and I added two beautiful hanging baskets of Boston ferns, purchased at the small open air farmer's market where I go to buy fresh vegetables. The porch is definitely my happy place these days.
The fig tree that I started from my friend Carol's cuttings last summer.
I may plant it in the yard this fall.
The orchids seem happy outside.
Handsome Georgie enjoys the porch!
Ginger thought I was holding a morsel of food. (I wasn't.)
The little ornamental pomegranate given to me by a friend.
If you look closely, you can see tiny little fruit buds popping up all over it.
Speaking of pomegranates, I had one that I grew from a small seedling in a large pot for years
prior to moving here. A year ago, I planted it in the ground beside the porch. It's shot up to about 7 feet tall, and it also has fruit (or are they flower?) buds for the first time.
We've had this ficus for longer than we've been married. It was largely neglected for years when the little sparrow Chip lived in it, but it's always managed to hang on. We're hoping to grow it out some on the porch this summer. It will go back in our den late in the fall.
I can't wait for spring break, it seems to be taking forever to get here. I can't help but laugh at myself a little when I'm tempted to complain about how late it is this year. At this time two years ago I was working in a retail job I hated with no time off except the two or three weeks' paid vacation I got which had to last the whole year. And I had to work there over 5 years to qualify for that much time off! Now I have a week and a half at Easter, the whole summer, almost a week at Thanksgiving, and two weeks over the winter holidays off. I'm trying to always remember what a luxury that is.
It does seem to be taking a long time for our spring break to get here, though. Our local school district ties it to the Easter holiday, and Easter falls late this year. We're out of school from Good Friday, April 19th, until Monday April 29. Once we get back to school there's only 4 or 5 weeks left until we dismiss for the summer.
Gregg is taking an extra day or two off with me over the holiday. He gets very little time off so I kind of insisted he take some time to spend with me and to relax! After he goes back to work I'm considering going to visit my father in law and sister in law for a day or two. I've been meaning to get up to Raleigh for a visit since my mother in law passed away, but we've been so busy with buying a house and then the holidays that it's been on the back burner. I'd like to see Lou, and I'm also thinking about asking for some divisions and cuttings of plants that Edythe loved from their yard.
Spring has already fully sprung here in South Carolina. Our new little neighborhood, being adjacent to a small creek and nature trail, has lots of old dogwoods in full bloom, wisteria running riot, and even some trees draped in Spanish moss. Not to mention a thousand shades of green. We've never seen so many birds and such a variety at our feeders. There are scores of Northern Cardinals, House Finches, Song Sparrows, Mourning Doves, Tufted Titmice, Carolina Chickadees, Carolina wrens, and lesser numbers of Red Bellied woodpeckers, Red Breasted nuthatches, White Breasted nuthatches, Common grackles, and the occasional Blue jay. Best of all, we have our very own pair of Barred owls that live here! We hear their calls almost every afternoon when they first wake up ( a soft "who cooks for you, who cooks for you all") and then occasionally throughout the night. They're often hanging out close to our house (I fear they may have some interest in our well populated feeders, but so far we've never seen an attack). One of them landed in the tree over our driveway the other evening at dusk, and we got a good look at him/her. It was pretty amazing! Sometimes when the weather is mild and I'm sleeping with the window open, I wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of the pair calling softly to each other in the dark. It's a lovely, reassuring sound.
Cro's mention of taking cuttings and growing soft fruits in his last blog post got me thinking about how much I want to have a garden of my own. His "Haddocks" is a joy to read about. I love the idea of growing most of the fruits and vegetables that the family eats.
Something most people reading here probably don't know about me is that I used to do a fair bit of gardening. I spent a large chunk of my twenties slightly obsessed with growing heirloom tomatoes and trading seeds with other similarly obsessed people from all over the world. I grew dozens of plants in my small rental backyard and in large containers each year, and also kept fairly good notes on all the varieties that I tried. Most years I'd also grow a few pepper plants with the odd cucumber thrown in along with the tomatoes. The soil was a challenge and I spent years improving it, even going so far as having a small compost bin that I worked on faithfully. Just when the garden soil was finally getting nice and fertile, we moved. Since then I've been reluctant to put so much effort into doing that again in a rental house. We're finally starting to make plans to find a realtor and to buy a home of our own, and it will have to have a good yard for making a garden!
Even though I'm not in a place right now to do any seed starting, this time of year always reawakens the urge in me to do just that. I find myself browsing the seed catalogs and daydreaming about what I'd pick if I could. Something about the lengthening days at the end of January calls to my soul, and I want to see tiny delicate green sprouts popping up. Normally when germinating vegetable seeds I'd start about 6 weeks before our average last frost date, which around here ends up being early to mid February. It's almost time!
