good intentions meet gardening season

All my good intentions about blogging more often collided with my equally good intentions to do more gardening now that I'm retired. While good intentions are most often found paving the road to hell, this time the garden path won out & blogging came a distant second.

There have been plenty of ridiculous news items for me to rant about lately, not least of which are various local & national politicians in court for -- wait for it -- lying to the public about *gasp* misuse of public funds & power...but, I digress. This post is not a rant, but a rave. About spring, of all things.

Our climate, such as it is, flipped the winter-to-summer switch a couple of weeks ago, and there are at least 20 different shades of green on bushes & trees outside my window alone. It's a whole rainbow driving around town, with all the tulip beds in full bloom and everything from magnolias to crabapples blossoming in a mad dash. I'm not kidding when I call it flipping a switch, either. Spring in Ottawa is so short that you might miss it if you blinked. The early bulbs & flowering trees don't last long at all.

We've planted a lot of the Victory garden, too. That's V for vegetable, mainly, with a few herbs and some flowers to add a bit of colour. It's a very nice thing to be able to get some of your veggies out of your own yard. So far this year we've put in sugar snap peas, onion sets, salad greens, coriander, basil and parsley. All things that can be grown from seed starting fairly early in the season. I've got some plants inside that won't go out until early June, though, because we can count on the odd hard frost overnight until at least the end of May. Starting seedlings indoors is a good way to get a jump on spring, and makes late winter a lot less depressing.

Our property is on clay soil, and our front yard used to turn to hard-pan every year, until we xeriscaped it in local shrubs & trees. Now, the only maintenance it needs is pruning & mulching. Just our little bit for the environment.

Blogging is just going to have to wait for a rainy day.