Beautiful Sunday

Over the last few days we have been getting in nice weather, April showers... and a day of helleuvia rainstorms.
The rainstorm blew all the dirt out of my outdoor planted lavender tray... good thing I have an inside one going.

But right now, it's lovely out. The hyacinths and daffodils outisde the solarium are blooming like mad, as are the daffodils and hyacinths down by the garlic beds... I must have missed the crocuses down there somehow this year, and I'm not sure when, hehehehe.
All the garlic is looking healthy as hell... It does look like we are missing a couple of them, but I still have hope since there were a couple I thought were missing but are just now sending up little tender green shoots. I guess that only goes to show how one clove can be different from another in the greater scheme of things.

Since it was such a nice day, and for once I have off on a Sunday... you bet your sweet petunias I got out there and got some stuff done today :)

First order of business was cleaning up Moon's grave a bit and planting in her irises. They were beyond ready in their pots. The beautiful blue Victoria Falls ended up being two rhizomes and already had a couple baby ones to plant.. And the brilliant white Immortal was able to be split in half. Once I got the cleanup done and the irises planted in, I edged the area a wee big with some larger chunks of bark. I'm still debating on what other flowers are going to go in down there, it will likely depend a lot on how the irises do. Probably more blue and white, whatever it is. Lol, gonna make it a bit difficult once Pooks passes and it's time to put him in beside her- black and green flowers are much more difficult.

Then on to the next chore- getting the Pixwell gooseberry bushes into the ground. I had picked them up last spring and just potted them up in kitty litter buckets for the season, to help them get bigger and because I wasn't positive on where I wanted them to grow in yet. Well today they got planted in down in the milkweed area of the Sanctuary. Easy enough to get to, they can grow to their hearts delight there, and if the milkweeds are any indication, they should have the soil and water requirements they need. I read a lot of conflicting information about sun, them liking full sun but can tolerate shade vs them liking part shade but getting too crispy in full sun. So I figured screw it, full sun it is, they will see some morning and evening shade because they are in a full on sunny space between trees, lol.

I checked in on the peas and spinach.. got peas popping up, but the spinach isn't doing anything yet. Got a nice section of that area forked up, smoothed out, and planted in several seed tapes of Atomic Red carrot, Rainbow carrot, and Colorful Mix beets. It's right smack dab where one of the squash plants will be going later on, but that won't be for a while- and I really needed to get those tapes used, I made them last year, lol.

Hauled last years remnants of potato bags over to the newest lasagne bed, and dumped them out. The straw is nice and spoiled, the compost well rotted- and heck, didn't see a single potato sprout in the bags, so I figure I'm good to go there. And the bed could use some topping off.

The other day I planted in my little kale starts and used up the rest of the seed I had in the kitchen garden. The plants are doing so-so, because they got rained on pretty hard, and the seeds aren't doing anything else yet. I planted in the brussels sprouts today in the kitchen garden, so I'm hoping they will do ok. I started un-mulching the herbs, and some are doing right fine, some not so much, like my corsican mint. That pretty much crapped out, I think I only have one plant that survived the winter. Ah well.. good thing I started a ton of creeping thyme this year. Or maybe I will plant some lavender in that area instead so I can get some goodly smelling flowers going on there.

Last but not least... I got the front edges of the lasagne beds hoed up pretty well and I sprinkled in a bunch of marigold seeds. I'm hoping that direct seeding will work there, I'm just tired of trying to get a lot of marigold plants going every spring, ehehehe. I do have some French dwarfs that I seeded in a week or two ago, so we shall see if I need to put those in, and if so, where.

Coming up this week is my four week seeding starts. Time is kind of starting to fly in a bit more as spring is coming on... felt like forever and a day between 12 and 10 week, now it just feels like two days ago that I did the 6 week seeding.

Of course, with all this nice weather, I've been having the solarium open a lot.. and the cats are thrilled about that.... I'm betting the chipmunks are not nearly as excited about that. Yes, of course, the chippies are back again, grrrrrr. But they do seem a bit less populous than last year, so that's a nice thing.

But tonight we are going out for dinner with the boys, and for once in a long time I'm not too wiped out from working or playing catch up here to just stay home and go to bed early.. so I'm off to get ready for dinner :)