Spring days...in January?

In the winter, I sometimes find myself pacing around in the house...like those poor animals at the zoo...just needing to get outdoors. This past weekend gave us an opportunity to enjoy an out of season spring day and boy, did we take advantage of it! It was over 70 degrees outside!

I spent hours lavishly watering every tree, shrub, and perennial...checking each over for signs of life and new growth. I'm happy to report that they all the trees look great with lots of plump little buds that make me ache for spring. This will be the second year for many of the fruit trees, so it will be exciting to see if they produce for us. I also checked on the blackberries and the blueberries...all is well on that front.

The strawberries had me very excited. I have to say these are one of the most attractive ground cover plants I've ever seen. Most of the leaves are still green and some are touched with red. Now that most of the other plants in the front flower garden have withered away, I can see that the strawberries spread more than I'd thought at my last garden inspection. I'm thinking of starting these in all the beds as groundcover in the spring.

Finally, I wandered out to the bed that holds my garlic and my Egyptian walking onions. I'm not sure about these. It was my first time to try garlic, and I'm thinking I may have planted too early, but time will tell. I do hope the onions pull through the winter as they came from extended family that lives in North Carolina and they've grown in family beds for generations. If they don't make it, I just might have to spend another week at the Davis cabin up on Grandfather Mountain...wouldn't that be a shame! ;-)

The two girlies enjoyed the great outdoors this weekend as well. They'd played alone for more than an hour when they came running up to me with a cup full of seeds they'd gathered! The morning glories that had grown up over their slide/swingset was chock full of lovely little black seeds. Looks like we'll have a bit more of these little beauties climbing around the homestead next summer! Those are my girls!!!