Gardening at Last!

Well, we are finally able to do some gardening.  Our perennial food plants are up and looking nice.

The rhubarb is almost ready to start picking.  I'm going to try cooking it with honey this year instead of sugar.

 

 

 

A couple of asparagus stalks are just starting to come up through the mulch.  We love to steam fresh asparagus and then add butter.  Yum!

 

Leaves on the raspberries.  We won't have fruit until early August, but fresh picked raspberries are a real treat worth waiting for.  Mr. M doesn't eat them because he doesn't like the seeds, so these are all mine.

 

 

 

This is part of the garlic patch that Mr. M planted last fall.  We use lots of garlic in our cooking, so it's nice to have our own that's home-grown.

 

These are new globe artichoke plants that Mr. M started a few weeks ago.  The first year we tried planting artichokes, they actually survived our winter up here.  They are perennials in warmer parts of the country, but not here normally. Those from last year didn't survive the winter.  These new plants should give us artichokes in a couple of months.  We boil them in water and then just dip the leaves and chokes in butter.  A real treat!


We planted onion sets, peas, and lettuce in the past couple of days.  We also got the fenced enclosure set up for the broccoli and Brussels sprouts to keep out the local rabbit population which seems to particularly love these kinds of plants.  For the first time last year, we had resident wrens eating any cabbage worms that were on these plants.  We saw them bringing the worms to the birdhouse to feed their young.  For the first time, we had no worms on the broccoli and hope the wrens return this year to do the same thing.

Once the soil warms up a bit, we'll be planting the rest of the vegetable seeds.

And, of course, there is the beginning of a nice crop of pretty yellow flowers.  I know that most people do their best to get rid of dandelions, and the plants do tend to grow and multiply pretty vigorously, but I really love to look at a yard full of them.  Maybe it's because yellow is one of my favorite colors.

And after such a long winter with lots of snow even into the first couple days of May, it's so nice to look at grass again.


I love this time of year.  Everything seems so fresh and new.  The grass has that bright spring green look to it as opposed to the darker green of summer.  And the new leaves on trees and shrubs help to reinforce the idea of rebirth, which is what spring is all about after a long winter.