Planting for Spring

    Alas. Our hands are tied. We can not plant anything. It isn't the fact that we're still in danger of frosty nights...that has never stopped us before, though it should have. It isn't that we're over budget and shouldn't spend money on unnecessaries - though we probably shouldn't. Our problem is a splendiferous one.
   Surrounding the house are flower beds. In the bed outside the kitchen window grows a ten foot rose which we didn't cut back in the fall. Now there are clumps of dark purple crocuses. The problem - we have no idea what else is in there. We arrived in late October and don't remember anything but the rose and a money plant. All winter the bed has been buried under two feet of leaves, and we are just now beginning to clean it out to see what arrives. So far I've found a lime green croc and a tin bucket. The dig continues.

A pot of greens

    There is another bed directly beneath the window in the dining room. There grows another rose, a hydrangea, some sorts of grasses and fifty or so iris rhyzomes - thus far.
    The bed across from that one, beside the weathered fence, contains too much lamb's ear, more grasses, chicks and hens, wild oregano, Joe Pye weed, some mystery bulbs, and, again, we know not what else. For us, this Spring will be like Christmas.
    So I have a drawer full of seeds and no place to put them.

   But I lie. I have stuck in a few seeds here and there. Among the lamb's ear, at the suggestion of mama, I scattered some bachelor's button seeds before last night's rain. The morning before I planted some Russell's lupin along the short slate wall between the two beds. A hanging basket above the nuthatch house holds nasturtium and sweet pea seeds.

    The one place I do feel free to plant is on either side of the front walk. It seems to have been left to its own devices. Last fall I interspersed stones then moss to prepare for an herbal rock garden. The primroses from the kitchen windows await that move.

    In Connecticut, in the second week of April, we are still very thirsty for color, including the green of the grass; and we are still anxiously awaiting the first leaves. Man-oh-man, it has been one very long bare season and I hope with all my heart that I have color to send for Kate's birthday next week.
    But slap me if I'm complaining because this is the first week that the house is over sixty degrees and, as I write this, a chikadee and a cardinal share the feeder outside the window.