The weekend went well. I accomplished several things on my to-do list, although not everthing. The weather cooperated on Saturday - about 50 degrees and mostly cloudy. On Sunday, it rained all day, but I was still able to get some garden-related items checked off my list.
The ice is slowly going off the pond. The picture above was from Saturday morning. By this morning the ice was about half of what you see above. The wood ducks arrived - I saw the first few this morning before work.
Saturday was the first official day in the garden for 2006. Here it is below, looking sad and forlorn as of Friday. On Saturday, I cleaned up the herb beds at the front of the picture.
Bill and I put up the deer fence on Saturday, too. The nice thing is that you can't see it in the picture below. (Just to give a perspective on where you are in the garden, the picture above was taken from the deck toward the south, and the picture below is essentially pivoting 180 degrees and taken toward the north. The house is just to the left in the picture below.)
Spring comes slowly to Minnesota, but it is definitely coming. The first thing that greens up is the moss.
This "forest" is growing right by our front door. According to many gardening books, the presence of moss in the yard means low fertility and high acidity in the soil. I'm not sure about the low fertility, since wherever I dig in the yard I uncover dark, crumbly soil and lots of worms. However, I don't doubt that our soil is acidic in many places. Given we are in a glacial till area, I'm not surprised. Anyway, I like the moss. It's green and has a good contrasting texture with the rest of the "lawn" (actually, there are more violets and creeping charlie than grass, but I don't mind that either).
Besides moss, though, there are other green things starting to poke their heads up out of the soil. Chives are the first plant to green up in the herb garden.
Some perennials are starting to come up. Last year, Jane B. at Grand Lake decided to put in another garage, and the old perennial garden was in the way. I went over with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law and got some plants. I got two big clumps of Bearded Iris, which is starting to poke it's head up.
While digging at Jane's, I found what I hope to be alliums of some sort.
I also have the plant below. Right now I have no idea what this is (although now that I think about it, it could be the bleeding heart I bought at Bachman's last year).
It rained all day on Sunday, but that was okay because I needed to pot up the tomatoes and peppers. I know I have too many, but I was seduced by the catalogs this year. I started double what I need, but I figure I'll find some people to give the extras to.
I also got the potatoes out, in the light and sending out shoots. I hope to plant them either next weekend or the following, all depending on the weather.
If the weather holds - stays in the 50's to low 60's and doesn't rain too much - next weekend I hope to plant spinach, radishes, scallions, beets, maybe peas, and maybe potatoes. I'll keep my fingers crossed!