In Which I Muse On The Sweet Pea

I finally found some seeds for those astoundingly gorgeous ruffled pansies that are popping up all over the place, but it took me long enough. I could never find the bedding plants yet all the farmers markets seemed to have baskets of them. They just weren't for sale, which was frustrating. Lo and behold this year I found a packet of Chalon Pansies and just now planted them. They require dark to germinate, according to the packet, so I dutifully placed them in an upstairs closet. After a few days I removed the plastic bag they were sitting in and saw this little intruder. Methinks it's no pansy, but medoesn't know what it is. It looks like a bean sprout.

Upstart! Begone from my ruffled pansies.





Is there anything more heartening after the long dark days of winter than trays of sweet pea seedlings?

I was at a garden sale the other night and I noticed a lot of trays of sweet peas at one table - they were the same size as mine, a fact which gave me enormous satisfaction, because it meant that I was getting rather more organized in my seed starting abilities. Either that or they were just as hopeful (and deluded) as I was about the promise of spring bloom.
Sweet peas are one of the few plants I don't have qualms about cutting for indoor bouquets. Other flowers give me a sharp pang when the scissors snip snip snip them from their rather longer life in the garden, but not sweet peas. As a plant they are less than spectacular. Mildly interesting at best. If they were just bloom I might feel differently, I suppose. Love those blooms.
Some of us took paint brushes to the nectarine trees, because they blossomed before the bees - even the mason bees - were out. And full on bloom, too. There they were, with their almost indecently pink blossoms, flowering all over the place when it was still mid-March. So I sent out the Garden Club members to do their bit, although one of them lost her paintbrush at some point and never did find it, despite the heckling of her compatriot.

Compatriot Doing His Bit To Help Nectarine Pollination (mollified by the prospect of featuring in a blog photo op)


We were rather transfixed by the strange appearance of this squonking band of Canada geese, until we realized that they weren't Canada geese, but Trumpeter Swans instead.

The clue was not just the, errm, white appearance, but those great long necks.