The First Day of Spring

As well as being the spring equinox, today was also a sunny day with a light breeze which was a potent invitation to get outside and continue with the spring clean of the garden beds. Splashes of yellow are starting to appear in my garden.

The rhubarb popped through just a few days ago so while I was outside today I took a few minutes to add some fertilizer to improve the crop this year.

Here is my second rhubarb plant (above) and I show it now with the birdbath for scale. Let's see how well it grows this year.

The plum tree is just bursting out into bloom. And one of the days tasks was taking down the hessian windbreak that I had up for protection of the fall planted boxwoods.

I continued cleaning up the top bed. At peak bloom this has a lot of echinacea with a few heliopsis (if the rabbits leave them alone) and Russian sage. To the left are a couple of bridal veil spirea which are just beginning to come into leaf. And the straw colored plant is New England asters which I cut down after taking the photo.

Some creature is tunneling in the rear of this garden area. You can perhaps see the upheaval in the grass. It drives the dog crazy when he goes out in the morning as there is a lot of new smell to investigate.

Earlier in the week I started the job of cutting back the liriope beside the front walk. Here you can see how bedraggled it was after the winter but that is all gone now. Behind that I had already cut back the chrysanthemums.

This was officially the first daffodil out in my garden this season on March 18.

And not to be outdone - another first splash of yellow is the faithful dandelion!

I'm looking forward to another good year in my garden.

What's a dog to do?

The ever faithful Rolo dog deserves a special mention from time to time.

Yesterday as I returned from yet another quilt related outing who was it greeted me first at the back door? Why Rolo of course as it was very necessary to give me the entire sniff over to see what enticing odors had stuck to me while I was out and about. He watched while I dragged my bags inside and as I parked my sewing machine ready to take upstairs he flopped down beside it with a resigned look on his face. Perhaps he was going to guard this bag to make sure it stayed home tomorrow!


Around the middle of the day today Geoff noticed that someone had left open the closet door where Rolo's dog food is stored and that it had been like that for several hours. But the ever faithful Rolo had not taken advantage of that open door and decided to snack away. Not our Rolo.

Despite the fact that his food and water bowls are very close to where his food is stored he had not helped himself.

Here's a shot of him when he was excited to think that he might be going somewhere:



What a great dog he is. He will be ten years old on April 25.