the fruit of the matter...

This is so like us! I walk over to check the blooms on the fruit trees in the new orchard and I pause by what used to be our tomato field and grape arbor. We've let that land go to seed, or to weed. Ed found better space for his veggie and melon garden. The grapes were routinely devoured by beetles. We just gave up.

But in the thick of that current mess, there once were blueberries. Planted by Ed and added to by me. Three bushes. They were protected by fencing, so reaching for berries was never easy, but a small child's hand could do it, and us big guys found ways as well, and if you have ever tasted blueberries right off the branch, you'll know how awesome they can be. 

So I asked Ed to come out and see the mostly dried up blueberry bushes and give an opinion on whether to resume some berry production in that same spot (back of the new orchard). It would require chopping down six black walnuts which had invaded the space. For some reason, Ed did not immediately object. Indeed, before we even sat down to breakfast, he gave a thumbs up to the project and a minute later he was out there with his chainsaw. 

Trees are down. An hour later, I ordered a half dozen blueberry bushes. And a new project is born!

It's as if nothing is really intentional here, on farmette lands. Sometimes we make plans, but most often, we walk out, or I walk out, and an idea is born, or a spot of land is cleared, or another bed is weeded. There is so much to do everywhere, that making lists and following a master plan would rapidly become a chore. What we love most is that outdoor work never rises to the level of a burden, or drudgery. It's our delight. And spontaneity figures deeply into that feeling of contentment and indeed -- joy.

All that took place this morning and I'm thinking now that the trigger for it all was such a chance thing:  my morning glance out the window, looking east, toward the old orchard. There are apples and pears and firs and pines and quince trees, all smushed together. I'm responsible for the quinces, but the fruit trees are of the old variety and they were planted decades ago by the farmers who farmed this land way before we ever showed up. Ed likes the old world fruits. Too me, they have tough skins. I've grown used to the newfangled honeycrisps, so I leave these fruits to him and the animals. Still, what struck me today was how absolutely stunning one of the apples is right now. In full bloom. 

This glance out the window is what prompted me to head out to our own new orchard. (Where the plum is blooming its head off! It always puts on a show, even as it has never produces any fruit.)

So, fruit trees are the star attraction at the moment. Well, the daffodils are going strong as well. April is unfolding gloriously this year.

Breakfast.

I should also say that this is the moment when I most love and admire the bronze statues that Ed's mom made and that we've placed in various corners of the garden. Here's one that I especially like:

And here's another:

 

The rest of my free time is sucked up by weeding and lily and clematis feeding (I do that once a year). I barely had time to drink a cup of coffee for lunch. 

 

 

 

I need to pick up the girl at school! 

It isn't hard to get her to spend a few minutes outside. 

But just a few minutes. Food and books trump all, grand weather notwithstanding!

Evening drop off at her youngest brother's school, where we also meet up with Sparrow...

Long after I said goodbye to all of them, I remain in the garden. This is the day to start planting the lily and fern bulbs we purchased this February at the Garden Expo. I'm a little uneasy about them -- bulbs are hard to track in your garden and these are especially mysterious because they come from an unknown grower, but still -- in they go -- before the rains come at us tomorrow!

Dinner is very, very late.

And that's a good thing. So much accomplished... so much more still to do!

with love...

one person's canvas of great beauty is another animal's lunch

On this most brilliant April day ever, a day so gorgeous that I haven't the words to give it its deserving recognition, I look outside and catch Ed pacing the farmette lands. He's taking a break from doing his taxes. (When it's tax time, he keeps strange hours.) He shouts up to the upstairs window of the farmhouse -- gorgeous, bad news.

I know it's not the chickens. I see them milling around. I wait for part two of the story.

Your berry and currant bushes? The ones you planted yesterday? The groundhog ate them.

All the stuff that's growing everywhere now and the groundhogs have to go after my three new plantings? Unbelievable. 

*     *     *

One thing I like about Facebook is that, perhaps with a little intentional prodding, it has pegged me as a lover of art, especially turn of the century canvases. Impressionism, Fauvism -- I love it all. This morning, browsing idly through my FB account, I came across paintings by Bonnard and I paused for a while, exploring some of his stuff on this one theme: breakfast. Here's one canvas that I love (he has several, though I think translating "dejeuner" as breakfast is a little incorrect):

Is there a better mood setting piece of art, that so beautifully depicts that moment at the table, over a cup of coffee perhaps (tea for her), before the day fully swings into action, where you just revel in the enormity and wonder of being alive and having this chance to begin a fresh day? 

Here's our breakfast -- less artistically depicted, but as always, felt intensely by me...

*     *     *

It's still the time of daffodils.

But the eye is starting to dart toward other sprouting delights. In fact, right now, everywhere I look there is something enchanting. Smile worthy.

Well, I surely have work to do. Finish cleaning up the lavender field, move some perennials, snip off dead tree branches that, as I tell Ed, ruin my visuals!

This is is work around the edges. The main planting is yet to begin. When? Who knows. The plants need to get here (I use four growers: Oakes Daylilies, White Flower Farm, Prairie Nursery, and for a first try this year -- Bluestone Perennials), the weather needs to be hospitable. Sure, today we are reaching 80f (nearly 27c). A ridiculous temperature for mid-April! It wont last. And yes, we do need good spring rain showers as well. For planting? I'm not fussy! Just halt any heavy rains and toss the super cold days out the door. Anything else is just fine!

*     *     *

In the evening, the young family is here for dinner. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(the boy hits the cheese and the girl hits the olives...)

 

 

Evening indeed! The sun is still so bright that it hits the eyes of anyone at the table facing the west window.

(I bring out his sun glasses!)

Indeed, when they leave, even though it is nearing the kids' bedtime, there's plenty of light out there.

One more warm day in store for us. Tomorrow. I wont waste it! 

With love...

June day, with April overtones

Everything about this day smacks of perfection. Sunny and warm. June-like temperatures. So much that can be done outside! And we -- Ed and I -- both set out to do it. [Remember when I wrote back in early March that I will not have a day without grandkids until mid April? Well now, this is that day. I have no commitments to anyone or anything -- except to the work that waits for me outdoors. The timing has been perfect -- lots of joyous moments with the little ones when the weather was dicey, with a focus on flowers and plants today, when the weather is absolutely glorious.]

We flip things around a bit. Ed wants to plant the spruce, pine and fir trees that arrived yesterday and that we intend to use as shields against the development that sprung up seemingly overnight. 

Of course, it will take a while for them to become established, let alone grow to a sizeable height, but we are planting optimists who seem to regard time as an endless expanse of seasons and hey, maybe we'll see them get big, maybe we wont, but the images are there for us!

In the meantime, I take a quick look at the garden...

And then we head out! No, still not for breakfast. Today is the first day of the downtown Farmers Market. I'm hungry for a spin around the market even more than I am for my first coffee of the day! Ed wants to buy some cheese curds, I have baked goods to pick up at the bakery. Isn't that a fine way to get the weekend off to a great start?

The market is ... crowded! Considering that few foods from the ground can be sold in April, I have to say that this has me a little worried about how the rest of the markets will look. Ours run for six and a half months and of course, the most crowded ones tend to be in the summer when produce and flowers flood the stalls. Today, I have to think it's the weather that brought out the crowds. People just want an excuse to be outside.
 

Ed picks up curds...

I visit with Jaime from Natalie's, Bill from Snug Haven Farms, and Dave from the Flower Factory. I stop for a while at this last stand. Dave no longer runs the perennial heaven that bore the Flower Factory name, but he brings a few plants each week to the market, just for the fun of being there with a small truckload of plants. We compare notes on how our lavender fared this winter (I think mostly good, though it does get damaged by heavy snows). I tell him how much I miss having a local perennial grower. He agrees that all the flower people have closed shop. Annuals -- still plenty of them out there, but perennials? The sellers are all bringing them in from distant growers. 

Dave also convinces me to try growing some black currants and honey berries. I'm on it! I pick up three little pots and this becomes my late morning project.

But first, of course, we do (finally!) eat breakfast.

Now for the berry bushes:

(my wood chips delivery service!)

Not done with plants yet! In the afternoon, I head out for the soft opening of Kopke's -- my source for many, many annuals. 

 

 

 

I can't really fill the tubs yet, especially given the frost that is likely to hit us next weekend, but I pick up a couple of baskets that I can carry inside on questionable nights. And, too,  I get pansies. These are always my first flowers for a basket that greets you as you walk toward the house from the driveway. This one:

And I plant sweet peas. The blooming kind, not the pods for your salads and stir-fries. Our groundhogs eat the sugar snaps like crazy, so I'm sticking with the flowers this year. (Pansies and peas can take a light frost, so I needn't worry about next week's weather.)

Such an incredible day! I tell Ed that I cannot believe we are already in the thick of the spring season. I have learned to not anticipate it when we're in the middle of a winter month. To instead revel in the quiet joys of the colder weeks. Is this why when we finally hit the forward button on spring, I am so awestruck? So surprised and delighted all at the same time?

Evening. We are both tired souls. Ed naps on and off. I put my feet up and study my flower charts. Tomorrow is another gorgeous day. I have lots to do!

With love...

ahead of schedule

This April is full of exclamation marks. An unexpected snow, yes, there was that. It's long forgotten. The days have been stunning, the weather? Coming in at full speed! It is tradition that I should start hounding my two local greenhouses -- Natalie's and Kopke's -- on April 21st. Not this year. Ed tells me that Natalie's is already receiving its first customers and Kopke's, perhaps looking ahead to the sunshine of this weekend, just announced that it will be open both Saturday and Sunday for a "sneak preview." Will I go to either place? Well what do you think!

These early openings, early temptations, early coaxes are dangerous of course. Tomorrow we're going to hit 75f (24c), but next weekend, we're going to go back down to a low of 29f, which, of course, is below freezing. And a high of 43f (which is all of 6c). The spotty warm days can lead you to make hefty gardening mistakes. I always rush the season and plant in advance of the last frost date (most perennials wont mind), but these greenhouse openings are just an unfair temptation to start picking up container annuals. Still, I want to walk those rows of blooming flowers again! It's too wonderful to be this close to full blown spring!

Our morning is lovely. A precursor to a beautiful weekend.

Breakfast? Also lovely.

And then we set out for Natalie's. A week early! 

And there's a happy twist to her story: her husband had been stopped from reentering the US three years ago when he went for the funeral of his father in Mexico. Because we have a very... shall we say "complicated" border situation right now, it took him three years to gain permission to come back. And he finally got it (not without drama)!  And she is ecstatic.

And her flowers are beautiful and I buy my first basket of the season.

The remaining hours of the morning? Spent on weeding. You can assume that any unaccounted for hours going forward are spent on weeding!

Until it's time to pick up the kids.

It's a long day for me. I had planned on grocery shopping today and I did not get to it until after 6. Which means that dinner -- reheated chili and a salad -- isn't until 8. Full days are good days! And at least weather-wise, I know that tomorrow will be even better.

With love...

so what dont you like about spring?

Each and every season brings with it some things, predictable things, that make you roll your eyes, shake your head and hold your nose. So, after all my rhapsodizing about the coming of this season, let me turn to spring's shortcomings. No, no, I'm not going to gripe about the weather. For one thing it is quite pleasant, but even if it wasn't, we know spring is always finicky, sometimes cold, sometimes wet. If you want something else, you need to move out of south central Wisconsin, because sometimes cold, sometimes wet is what we have here and frankly, unless it gets extreme, this is what the growing season needs.

Okay, but spring's yukky moments -- let's get back to those. What am I thinking of? 

Well, one spring ritual is the tracking of ants. They want to form homesteads, preferably in our house. April is the time when they march right in and search out the food sources for their ant villages. Some of the ants are so small that you dont really notice them. Until you sit down to breakfast and open the jar of honey and find a whole bunch of them swimming in goo. You have to be vigilant and discourage these guys from setting up shop right in your food pantry. So today we vacuum and I clean out the honey jar and still I track down a handful of those little buggers -- underneath the place-mat. This will continue for the month. Eventually they will go away, but for now, it's us against them.

Then there is the porch. As you may have noticed, we have screens on three sides. The porch is also a resting place to 4 cats (though never at the same time as they are not exactly best buds). This means that during the cold season -- late autumn, all of winter, early spring -- every rain shower hitting the ground on the outside, every ramble of a cat, every gust of wind, is going to bring in dirt. Before we can even think about taking a meal outside, that porch has to be scrubbed, wiped down, vacuumed -- all of it. With buckets of soapy water, a powerful vacuum cleaner and not a small amount of stamina. Hateful task, but it has to be done and I set out to do that today. 

Okay -- those are spring woes, far outnumbered by spring treasures. [Looking ahead, I can list summer woes -- mosquitoes, for sure, and over-air-conditioned interiors. Fall woes? Wasps and yellow jackets, and the frost that wipes out all your annuals. Annoying!] 

Ah, but those spring treasures! Let's start with the morning exploration of the garden...

Breakfast? Still inside. Mornings are nippy and the porch is still dirty.

And then comes the ridiculously tedious porch cleaning. Ed asks -- can I help? But the offer comes too late and besides, I am too hell bent on being the martyr here, so I persevere alone.

Okay, good enough. Not that you can tell by glancing outside. Until the arrival of the annuals, the porch always looks rather naked. But at least it is reasonably grime-free.

And wouldn't you know it -- it's time to pick up the kids.

All those daffodils! What's not to like?? Oh, right. Porch cleaning. Ants in the house. And the kids would probably add -- the ladybug-like beetles! I must pick several dozen each day off the windows. Inside. And we have very tight windows. And still, they come in somehow. 

But let's end on a positive note. Look what's starting to bloom for us! Virginia Bluebells! To go with the blueberry muffins I baked today. April blues, of the good kind!

with love...