the world has started to bloom

It has been raining for the past few days and it seems like over night the world has started to bloom. The grass (or weeds in our case) is turning green, the trees have buds covering them and some have even bloomed and little flowers are sprouting up all over. I love spring.....well, at least until the pine pollen starts taking over and then my allergies become a problem and I love spring a little less. But for now I've got nothing but love! The rain stopped, the sun came out and we got to spend some time outdoors today! Boy was it muddy, but muddy is super fun to little ones!! :o) Maddie's current favorite thing to do outside is pick "flowers." Mostly she just picks weeds, which is totally okay with me!


We got 3 of our 6 cherry trees the other day. My use of the word tree is very loose because they more closely resemble twigs. They are seriously so small you wouldn't even know they were there except for the mulch surrounding them. See that twig in the picture that isn't even as tall as Charlotte? That's one of our cherry trees!! The twigs already have buds on them, so I anticipate they'll have a growth spurt sometime in the near future. I was pretty skeptical about bare root trees, but I've been told that they grow really well.....we'll see. The other 3 cherry trees are going in our backyard and Dan and I ordered 5 more fruit trees......2 apple, 1 peach, 1 plum and 1 pear. I'm really excited to get all of these tress planted, it just sucks that we won't have any fruit for 2-3 years. Boo. Although the cherry trees are supposed to fruit after 1 year, so again.....we'll see.


We finally bit the bullet and bought dirt for the one garden bed that Dan finished. We still haven't ordered our soil yet because it's been so wet, so we bought bags of topsoil, compost and peat moss and mixed that all in with leaves in our yard and filled the garden box up. I am going to try the lasagna gardening method for the beds, but the top soil was really clumpy so I had Dan till it all up to mix it. I'll try layering in the next bed.....we'll see which way works better. This bed has broccoli, brussel sprouts, and lettuce growing. I planted 2 more varieties of lettuce and 2 varieties of carrots in there as well.....we'll see how those seeds do.

Isn't Dan's garden box beautiful? He's turning into a really good carpenter!

Broccoli

Red leaf lettuce

Brussel sprouts

And look what popped up after only 3 days? These seedlings came up amazingly fast! Not all of them are sprouting, but I'd say about half have activity which is great since it's been only a few days.....some seeds take up to 20 days to germinate. That grow light that Dan made is working really well. I currently have the tops popped off, the grow light about 2 inches from the tops of the seedlings, and a fan running on low 24/7 to keep the air circulating which also helps the seedlings to grow up stocky and strong. Did you know that seedlings benefit from daily light touch? Gently run your fingers across the tops of of your plants and they will toughen up which will make it easier to harden and transplant them! ;o)


Look at what the girls and I found in the yard today? I'm not really sure what the difference is between scallions and bunching onions or if there even is a difference. The pictures of both look the same to me.....so we're gonna call these scallions......if I'm wrong, please let me know! It amazes me that scallions grow ALL over Wake and Johnston counties. They used to grow wild in our old yard, they grow wild at the park and now we're finding them in our front yard. Our old neighborhood used to be farm land and we always believed that they grew scallions at some point which is why they continued to grow wild in our yard.......but our current neighborhood is 60 years old! If it was ever farm land, that sure is a lot of years gone by for there to still be scallion growth. Puzzling. I don't know if we'll eat them.....maybe if they fatten up a little bit. But I don't know if they will survive our landscaping plans for this spring. I'll be planting them in one of my future garden beds though, so even if our wild yard scallions don't make it, we'll still be able to grow and enjoy them!