First strawberry blooms

And there are hundreds of buds reading to bloom. Perhaps a large strawberry harvest to come?

Potatoes sprout....and get frosted

A purple potato sprout

A few days later these got a little frost......killed off the sprouts but potatoes put up new shoots shortly after the frost.

Dividing sansevieria trisfasciata 'Hahnii'

I divided my Sansevieria trifasciata 'Hahnii'....wow...I feel smart just for saying that. Let's just call them STH. It's a small house plant that evidently does a good job of cleaning toxins from indoor air. I had to do quite a bit of searching online to figure out what the heck it even was. Other sub-species are called Mother-in-Law's Tongue and are taller and more popular as house plants.

These plants came from one small "momma" that I "borrowed" from my mother's house. I don't know from where or how she first received her STH starts, but she had been growing and killing them for many years. Evidently both she and I were not doing this right, despite their tendency to sprout new plants and spread.

The one on the left was divided out last spring and has grown leaps and bounds over the other two. I assume it's the larger pot with a drain.

I got some general advice from Urban Jungle, a tropical plant service in Northwest Arkansas, that showed me just how wrong I was about them. They like very well drained soil and like to dry out very well between waterings...oops...those drain-less small clay pots or random containers with no drains were not cutting it. And judging from this picture, my small clay pots were far too small.

(root bound plants are not good)

My hunch appears to be right. Better drainage, don't be afraid to let them dry out, and they need a bigger pot. I hope the divided plants flourish in their new, more appropriate, pots.

Last minute garden additions

New NO MOW ZONE around the base of the two huge sugar maples. Grass barely grows, there is some ground cover vines that should spread to fill it if not mowed, and perhaps we can drop in random shade loving plants. Or just let it go all natural. Used logs from the branches downed two years ago in the ice storm to outline the area.

New bed, pre-compost...because more seeds were bought than we had room for plants.

So this is what the back yard and vegetable garden looks like at the beginning of the spring season. Just a few things poking up and growing at this point.

First Harvest

Casey was hoping to get quick radishes going first, but last year's asparagus plantings have beat him to it. I snapped off four good sized spears this morning. I ate one fresh, just so I could say I'd eaten something I'd grown today, but I think I'll wait and cook the others. :-)

Rattlesnake!

I was dumping compost, right next the wood pile that really should have been cleared of brush and weeds last year. I heard a wicked rattle...it terrified me. I immediately thought of a rattlesnake, but remembered that it was far too cool of a spring day for a rattlesnake to be out and about.

Guess what it was?

I felt stupid. These are the seed pods of our "mimosa" tree, on a branch that had been trimmed a few weeks previous. They are very dry and clumped together like that they make a great rattle.

"Mimosa" you ask? Albizia julibrissin is often called mimosa in the US, though it is not in the Mimosa family. It's non-native, tends towards invasive, and should more rightly be called a Persian silk tree among other names. Does that seed pod remind you of a bean pod? Well it's in legume family...go figure. It had a beautiful blooms last year in early June.

Forsythia fail

The big forsythia in the front yard kinda failed this spring.

My only assumption is that the buds couldn't handle the extremely cold temperatures we had rather late in the season, during one of our horrible snow storms. After all, this is Arkansas. Why did it bloom on the first foot of the plant? Maybe the 14 or 15 inches of snow insulated the plant. Don't even ask about the pruning that should have happened....