Around the Garden: What's Up, What's Blooming, Booming...

The star of the garden show, my rhododendron 'PJM', blooming nearly a month earlier than it ever has.


These scilla bloom under the carefully manicured privet hedge. They are only truly visible to my ankles and the rabbit. The privet is just starting to leaf out so there is a bit of a blue glow about the base that is visible, and that's cool.

These are the unopened flower of the prairie smoke, geum triflorum. Each phase of the flowering, bud, flower, and seed pod looks like a "flower" so the triflorum part, I suppose. Although, if I actually pulled one apart, I'd bet I see only three sepals or tepals.

A better look at those pretty blue scilla.

Raddichio in garden, coming up from last year. It seemed to have a very bitter taste last year. I see this morning the rabbits have found it. The flavor must have improved.

Lysimachia 'Gold Coin', has a beautiful gold glow this time of year.

Rhubarb just coming up.

There's a lot going on in the potager. The peas I have planted are up. I got a great stand, good germination rate. I typically plan on 50% -65%, but I would guess it is closer to 100%. This March has certainly been good pea weather, unlike last year.

That means over in the family garden the peas are certainly coming up, too. These are the peas my sister-in-law asked me to please plant for baby Asher, who has stubbornly not made his way into the world.

Other things have been stubborn this March, too. My Internet connection has been driving me nuts. Currently, we are able to make only a tenuous hardline connection to the Internet, in a household filled with wannabee wireless devices. Probably a router, but maybe a cable. More trouble-shooting this time-waster.

The huge limb that broke off and hung up 30' up in my white pine crashed to the ground last night. Just last week, I was calling around to find someone with a cherry picker to come and charge me an arm and a leg to remove it from the tree. Last night's wind did the job for me, saving me $250 to $500, maybe more.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif My calling range was getting increasingly larger, 100 miles. No one had the type of equipment that would have been needed. With our early spring, I was increasingly worrying about finding someone with equipment, AFTER my gorgeous hosta had poke up their eyes and started unfurling their leaves. I had ghastly images in my mind of torn, tattered, and bedraggled hosta just in time for my Handsome Son's graduation party.

And, I heard that another boom rocked Clintonville last night. Out of curiosity, I will check the vertical ground tracking on the Shiocton seismography station. (It does appear there was some heavier vertical plate grinding between 4 and 6 AM.)

My son and I always talk about preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse. Perhaps, we should now be thinking earthquakes, instead. Possible the earthquake dislodged my stubborn white pine widow-maker?

Tonight, as fate would have it the Emergency Management Direc`tor for the county has a tabletop disaster exercise planned. I get to play myself, village trustee. Invite only, it should be interesting.