How Does My Garden Grow?

A couple of days ago, I checked the weather and it looked to be just fine, a good time to plant tomatoes.  So I dragged out the tomato spirals, laid them out nicely and proceeded to put each and every tomato plant into the ground.   Please note that normally, I don't plant them all the seedlings, because more germinate than I have time to process the harvest.   I have planted all 16 tomato plants this year.. sheesh.. What was I thinking?  I mean there are even 5 cherry tomato plants.  That is a lot of cherry tomatoes!  They all survived the last few days of unseasonably cold weather, including frost warnings, thanks to lots of straw and some plastic bag cloches.  

I also got the new blueberries in the ground to replace the entire patch that the bunnies ate over the winter.  They came planted with strawberries for some reason, so I dug up an area for them and now we have an unplanned strawberry patch, which will hopefully start to bear next year.   I found another blackberry bush as well, so that should finish filling up the row for those.    I planted a small patch of potatoes.  Not enough to store for the winter, but hopefully enough for over the summer.  The Japanese Indigo is planted as well.   I finally got the greens in, spinach, lettuce, beets and cilantro.  It's way too late for these, but the garden was way to wet and soggy until just recently.

The Lilacs are just starting to fade.  Over the weekend though, the scent was incredible.  I wish we had some dark purple ones, but they are mainly white and pale purple.  I can't think of a space to put new ones in, so the dark purple will have to wait.

Then, I looked up and the Dame's Rocket was blooming!  Yesterday it wasn't there and poof, today, a beautiful pink spray in the flowerbed.  It's the first.  There will be more coming.

The Bleeding Heart is so pretty this year.  This one is an incredible deep pink.  It's such a quick plant, growing, blooming and then dying back before mid summer. 

Yesterday I was able to finish spinning up the second bobbin of the Black North Country Cheviot fibre.   Today, I plied it together.  There is just under 250 yards here of woollen spun yarn.    It's black but the sun is washing out the colour.  It's  outerwear yarn, soft enough but not something I really want to cuddle up with.  There is still about half of the roving left, so a few more skeins to come.    It will have to wait though as I'm wanting to spin something less wintery feeling right now.

I looked up today and saw these chooks doing what chooks will do... sunbathing in the dirt.  Every year they find new places to dig holes in the yard.  They roll around in the sandy soil, relaxing in the sun.  The first time I saw them I thought they were having some sort of seizures.  The second time, they didn't move for ages, and I thought they were dead.  Nope, just enjoying a sunshiney afternoon!