Ack. I hate daylight savings. It messes me up. This morning, Bea perched her furry butt on my chest at 6 a.m, at which time normally, I'd roll over and send her on her way. Only it was 7 a.m., which is actually feeding time - bonus for her, not so much for me. Now, it's nine a.m. and usually, I would have had seven things done (okay, three), and I've done nada, zero, zip. Arghhhhhh.
To top it off, after yesterday's frigid temperatures, but glorious sunshine, it's snowing again today. AND Doug Ford will probably be our next Premier. Cue the bathroom scene music for Psycho.
Rather than turn this week's post into a complete rant, I'll instead hit the pause button on the griping and dream of gardens to come. This week, I got my seeds from Vesey's in the mail, so now I'm raring to get my hands dirty.
I think we're going to expand this year. Rob and I have dreams of taking another run at growing strawberries - this time planted out of the reach of the Scotch pine shade (?!)
While I've had very good luck growing green onions, the cooking onions (and red ones, for that matter) never do very well - actually I've never in five years harvested a single fragrant bulb. Instead of giving up altogether, this year I've ordered onion sets. I figure if somebody else gives them a head start, I can coax them to finish the job of growing, through harvest and maybe even a bit of storage. You can only order lots of 100, so I've enlisted my sister to take half of them (the garden's not getting THAT big).
We'll need more space for the expanded collection of sunflowers I plan on planting this year, too. I love all my flowers, but the GIGANTEUS beauties that have stalks as big as my wrist and heads as big as hub caps are right up there at the pinnacle of the flora world, as far as I'm concerned. A bonus is that they can be used to feed the birds after the fall show.
I noticed that the little bunny buggers have chewed most of my raspberry canes down to the quick, so will likely need to do some replanting there, too. Can't blame the wretched rodents for wanting to survive this extremely snowy winter, but...
We'll grow the usual assortment of mostly root vegetables, peas, peppers and tomatoes, and put back the gladiolus bulbs that were carefully lifted last fall.
I can't wait to see the striking colours of these splendiferous spikes again.
Glads - or sword lilies - are the flower of August, which also happens to be my birth month. They came over from Asia/Africa in the 1700s, and represent many fine characteristics, including deep love, admiration, faithfulness, integrity, persistence and ambition, so they say. That's a lot of flower to live up to - and I'm proud to grow them.
Anyhow. We will actually be strolling through spring on Vancouver Island next weekend, so the posts will return the week after. Until then, cheers.