Crocuses and Birdsong

I spent a couple of hours yesterday out in the garden, cutting back old, dead growth and weeding parts of the flower bed. We have two lavender plants that had become entwined with some kind of creeping grass. The plants themselves look terrible and I seriously considered ripping them out altogether, but lavender always looks bad at this time of year. So I restrained myself and managed, with patience, to trim them and remove most of the grass.

We have so many crocuses this year! I counted seven purple flowers out in the lawn. That may not sound like a lot, but it's more than I ever remember seeing before. We also have some yellow and beige ones in our flower bed by the back door.

Indoors, our little cactus has given us two blossoms once again...

...and another orchid has opened.

Remember all those foxglove seeds I planted last fall? Well, as I said a few days ago, they all died over the winter. So I dumped all those trays and began again yesterday. I planted foxgloves as well as some honesty, a few corncockle and the seeds of the jimsonweed I found last summer. I'm not sure those jimsonweed seeds are fully mature so they may not germinate. They're an experiment.

I also brought the trays indoors to give them some protection, which is what I should have done last fall. Live and learn.

Outdoors I scattered the rest of the corncockle and some poppy seeds, and planted my one pod of sweet peas, which seem small and underdeveloped. Our sweet peas may have come to the end of the line. We just didn't get any good seeds last year.

I decided not to plant the lupine seeds. The parent plants survived OK over the winter so there's no reason to grow more. I also have several seed packets that came free with our library subscription to Gardener's World magazine, and I'm going to take them to school and give them to someone else. If I planted all that stuff I'd have 500 seedlings and there's only so much I can manage.

Steve Reed · Dawn Chorus

Finally, to continue the springtime theme of this post, here's the dawn chorus as heard this morning in our garden. Noisy little birds!