Cold? Today, we will have rain

These top couple buds on Japanese peony 'Hanakisoi' appear dead, but I did not remove them.  I continue to remain optimistic, at least until the leaves break away from their petiole freely.

Commercially, spring has been slow to arrive here in central Wisconsin.  There are none of the greenhouses popping up on what seems like every corner as you see in years past.  For the past couple weeks I have been on the hunt for pansies. There have been simply none to be found.  After a couple days of hunting I actually bought seeds to germinate, thinking small pansies will be better than no pansies, especially if as I predict we will have a cool, spring.  I would add cool, damp spring, but I don't know if moisture is necessarily part of that picture.

With cooler a possibility this year, I planted some flowering sweet pea seeds.  If it is going to be cooler here, let's go with that.  I have planted an edible pot on my deck with two types of lettuce and edible peas dressed up with bamboo to form a tuteur on which the peas can scramble.  I have also planted some radish and carrots actually in the ground.  The lettuce and peas have already sprouted.

Today and tomorrow, it does look like rain is part of the picture, however.

Yesterday with the late afternoon blue skies I had not realized rain was the weekend forecast.  The weather here seemed to turn on a dime.  What was forecast to be hovering at freezing on Monday morning, now looks to be a solid 23 degrees (F).  Enough that the pansies I finally found will need a bit of cover, to not be set back over much on their flower output.

Finally, pansies in the window boxes

I have been working on my yard and garden.  As I move (very slowly) around the space I am reminded of all the plans I had pre-injury.  I stopped to talk in the street with a fellow gardener.  Four of the six or seven nicest gardens in the village are on my street.  It seems to be a walking destination for many in my village.  The walkers probably wonder if I died or something.  With so little clean-up and the grass unmowed since September, my little house certainly has had that abandoned look to it.

To my fellow gardener, I expressed my goal to not stress it this year, to keep it simple.  To do as little or as much as I felt like with no goals of perfection.

'Hanakisoi' last year

My hope is with the depth of this brutal winter, that most of my garden's signature plants simply survived.  Sometimes, simply surviving in the garden, and in life, is the big win.