English Garden Party

My lovely bloggy friend Sarah of Modern Country Style is hosting an English Garden Party today.  She can do that because she actually lives in England!  The Cotswolds, no less.  I’m sure to her it seems quite normal, but to me it seems so romantic!  She has a real English garden; that’s it on her party button.

 

I have a typical American yard, but I do not have a green thumb.  Every year I set out a few baskets of annuals, and that’s about it.  However, I did some looking through my photos and found some shots of flowers and such to give us a little visual relief from this winter weather.  Enjoy!

Around here one of the first harbingers of spring is forsythia.  Our red house had a large back yard that was surrounded on two sides with huge forsythia bushes.  It was quite spectacular when they were all in bloom, but of course I don’t seem to have a photo of that.

 Here are my boys in that house with our forsythia Easter tree, 2003.

 

Pinkerbelle at the apple orchard, 2003.

 

And here she is with a pot of flowers from my brother’s rehearsal dinner, 2006.  Classic P.

 

House #10 had two of these spring-blooming trees in the front yard.

          

 

In our current house:  first leaf buds on the little maple tree in our front yard,

 

baskets newly hung on the porch,

 

and (later in the summer) my grandmother’s ice-cream parlor chair turned planter.

I wonder if the sap is stirring yet,
If wintry birds are dreaming of a mate,
If frozen snowdrops feel as yet the sun
And crocus fires are kindling one by one:
Sing, robin, sing!
I still am sore in doubt concerning Spring.

                             from “The First Spring Day” by Christina Rossetti

Hurry, Spring!

First Harvest

Our square foot garden is doing quite well.  We actually had been kind of ignoring it for a couple of weeks because it was so rainy, but after a few days of hot and sunny this week, we went down to check it out last night.

Early April...I think there are a couple of things planted based on the tongue depressor markers.

Now.

Craig started the cauliflower from seed back in February.

I forget what Craig is going to plant in the empty boxes, but he's planning to do some work on it this weekend, including building a trellis for the snap peas.  You can see that the garden is virtually weed free, even though we have done absolutely no weeding.  That was one of the stated advantages of square foot gardening, and it appears to be true.

Last night I harvested a few of the outer swiss chard leaves.

Then I chopped them up and quickly sauteed them in a little olive oil and added a dash of sea salt.  Pinkerbelle and I thought it was delish!