What a sad, non-gardening week it has been. The weather has been grey and rainy and sometimes downright chilly. There was frost north of the city in the wee hours of Thursday morning. The only days of sun came on Thursday and Friday when I was at work. My only consolation was being able to sit outside during my lunch break on those days. Bookman with his variable schedule, was off on the sunny days and got to enjoy a little weeding. I am not being facetious when I say he enjoyed weeding. Bookman likes to weed. So do I. There is something meditative about it. Plus you get the satisfaction of accomplishing something at the same time.

I did plant something new. I received a card and letter in the mail from Colleen and the card is embedded with wildflower seeds. I’ve seen cards like this before but have never gotten one to try. Well, I planted it. Only I realized too late that I forgot to write down what flowers were in it so now I will have no idea what will be blooming from it later this summer. I do recall not recognizing any of the flowers though. Colleen lives in Toronto, hopefully she isn’t really some sort of government agent and my garden is now going to be ground-zero for an invasion of super-sized Canadian flowers that are ever so nice and say “eh?” after every other flowery comment. 🙂

The beans I planted last weekend are just starting to poke their heads above ground. I was also surprised to see the summer squash has already sprouted. The peas continue to go crazy and everything else is doing well too. Except the corn.

Last week I discovered two corn sprouts and cheered because the squirrels didn’t completely win. I will have at least enough corn come the end of July for one dinner. I should not have counted my corncobs so soon. Bookman saw a squirrel out digging in the garden yesterday and this morning, no more corn sprouts. Curse you squirrels! They won in the matter of the corn this year. But I have learned my lesson and next year, there shall be tall cornstalks in my garden! With my luck though they will like those too and if not them then the raccoon I saw ambling across the street one night earlier in the week probably will.

The apple trees are still blooming and looking oh so lovely. Clifford the Big Red Dogwood is also starting to bloom. When we planted Clifford we had no idea how big and wild he would get. He got a good pruning this spring but he is still large. After the flowers, it gets little berries on it that aren’t edible for us but the birds, especially the crows, love. I know a lot of people don’t like crows, but Bookman and I both do. They are such fascinating birds. Plus, they make Waldo go bonkers when they are out in the yard cawing. One night a year or so ago for some reason we were playing bird calls on the computer. The cats weren’t all that interested. Then we played a crow and Waldo leapt up and started running around looking out all the windows trying to figure out where the crow was. Of course that only egged us on to play it over and over until he traced the sound to the computer speaker and started prowling around it wondering how the bird could be in such a small thing. We laughed so hard we had tears in our eyes. Poor Waldo got really mad and huffed out of the room. He has since forgiven us, so please, no one report us for cruelty to animals.

Speaking of birds though, the little sandy beach I made next to the frog fountain is a hit with the sparrows. I saw them out there rolling around in it Thursday evening. That is exactly what I had hoped for. A happy success.

Dandelions are also blooming in the garden this week. I do love dandelions. I have had dandelion greens from the grocery store before but never plucked any from my own yard. This year I plan to add both greens and flowers to salads. I’ll let you know how that goes.

The pussytoes are in bloom too. These are hardy little low-growing prairie plants with grey-green leaves that put up flowers in spring that look like little soft cat paws.

Dogwood, dandelions, pussytoes, it’s an animal themed garden week! The alpine clematis just began blooming and is feeling a bit lonely for not being animal-y. It has a fairly long bloom time though and usually overlaps with the peonies. The peonies got a late start this year though so clematis might really be left all on its own. I don’t think there is anything about to bloom this coming week. The spiderwort maybe with its pretty purple-blue flowers. We’ll see!