Spring has definitely sprung!

Oh what a joy! Spring has finally come. It has been warm here for over a week, no coat for many weeks. It has been a long long cold winter and I am so glad it is over. The long torture of pursuing heat is over for this year. Thank goodness! We have been in the mid 60s even in the evening and that is making the plants pop. So gardening time is here. I have been finding little joys all over the place. The daffodils reached full bloom yesterday. They are spectacular to say the least.

The irises are about four or five inches high and the goldstrum has lots of sprouts gathering and rising. It looks like that plant which is in the heliopsis family,  loves the sandy dry soil here. I took a subdivision of my sister's plant in the Catskills of New York and tranplanted it to the New York New Jersey border, and then brought that same plant with me to here in Maryland's eastern shore. In southern New York it just hung out in the garden. It didn't increase in size, it didn't bloom, it was not a happy camper but it survived. Of course it was planted in the rockiest soil in the state of New York, or for that matter any state! So I am sure that had something to do with its lackluster growth habits.

When I moved, I brought it here and it bloomed beautifully. It stood strong and alone-my sister's needed stakes- and it was covered with flowers last year. This spring its sprouts are spectacular, so I have great hopes for some cut flowers this summer. Cut flowers are my biggest goal in gardening, well at least they had been, and in that horrible rocky soil of my home town I never was able to get enough cut flowers to satisfy my wants and needs. When I moved here I could not believe that a one hundred and forty year old house had no plantings and no flowers. Well, it did have many lilacs and some irises under a clump of overgrown forest, but no daffodils, tulips, crocus or even violets. Needless to say I set out to change that fast. I brought divisions of most of my garden plants from my New York garden, here to Maryland. Even now, they have not been put to full use. They have been planted as nursery stock in a filled in pool in the yard, to generate new plants for future plantings here. They are multiplying, but the sandy soil is a real challege. It does not hold moisture, so my challege will be to introduce organic matter to the sand to create a loam. This will be a long process, but to make it rewarding I do it one small space at a time, so I can get some reward from my planting by finishing it in chunks....hoping for a finished garden some time in the future. More next time!