Oh, these lovely mornings

I can’t wait for full daylight before I go to the garden.  I always know there will be some sort of surprise out there:  a different color of iris blooming, or lazy seeds that I had given up on ever germinating that come up all at once.  Gabe the dog and Blue, the cat are always chasing one another in the garden and making me laugh.  Throughout the dull, dreary winter, I revisit these things in my mind:  I don’t know that I have missed a spring sunrise for many years.  I’m always up around 4 A.M. just because I’m made that way, and many times I’ll step outside just to see where the moon and stars are on that day, long before the sun comes up.  I feel at peace with the earth when I’m outside. 

Cliff laughs at the fact I’m outside when he wakes up around 7 o’clock, knowing I’m out in the garden.  I always set up the coffeepot for him before I go out, so he only has to turn it on to have his coffee.

Last week I chose to believe that our weather is going to get back to normal after three dry years.  So to prove that to myself, I put all the soaker hoses away in the garage.  The last two years I wouldn’t have had much of anything in my garden without those soaker hoses.  Right after I put them away Thursday morning, we received yet more rain, as if to reassure me.  Peas are blooming and the green beans are starting to grow.  Cliff has been eating his white radishes right along and we’ve had spinach a couple of times, as well as lettuce.  Now the lettuce is bitter, though.  I googled “bitter lettuce” to see what makes it that way; well, apparently there are plenty of causes:  Dry weather, too much water, hot weather, not enough nutrients.  Well, I’m not going to worry about it, because there are other things I’ve been waiting to plant to plant in that space anyhow.

I do expect to be picking some strawberries next week sometime.  I’ve found a couple of ripe ones.  There’s only one packet of frozen strawberries from last year left in the freezer.  

I have too many tomato plants set out.  I do it every year, hoping that one variety or another will keep us eating tomatoes until October.  I even put out two more Jet Star plants yesterday, because they seem to be less blighty than some of the others.  Before I had ever heard of or seen tomato blight, which showed up in the late eighties in my world, I only ever had two varieties:  Big Boy and Rutgers.  Alas, those don’t last long enough for me to get a ripe tomato off them, these days.  

This was taken just as the sun was coming up after two inches of rain.