Don't save all your gardening for the weekend

I hope no one's weekend was ruined because I didn't post anything about the weekly tulip watch. Here's Saturday's photo. Luckily, they're coming along well enough that it's getting more difficult for me to remember which ones I was monitoring.


It's great-now I'm seeing tulips popping up all over the yard. I wouldn't want to guess how many tulips I've planted in the past 9 years-there were several years where I had a ritual of buying 2 dozen tulip bulbs the day before the Buffalo Run in September. I think I did that for 4 or 5 years, so that's easily 100 tulips right there. The ones I've been following in the photos were the very first tulips I bought in a bargain bag at Menards in the fall of 2000. I doubt I paid more than $10 for 50 bulbs, and they've been dug up and moved at least once. Their current and final location is along the fence in the vegetable garden, where they get a lot of sun all winter long. It's probably why they're always the first to arrive in the spring. I can't say all of the more expensive tulips I've bought have fared as well.

I just finished reading a nice little book I received for my birthday, The Curious Gardener's Almanac: Centuries of Practical Garden Wisdom by Niall Edworthy. It's a hodgepodge of gardening tips, recipes, old sayings, fun facts, and neat little design elements. (check out the gardener's cabbage head on the front cover.)

One of the tips that should've been obvious but I really liked anyway was don't save all of your gardening for the weekend. On Monday, it might sound like a good plan to spend the entire following Saturday outside in the yard, but what if you had a really good Friday night inside with some tasty adult beverages and pulling weeds out in 100 degree heat all of a sudden doesn't sound so fun? I don't plan to spend entire weeknight evenings gardening, but I would like to do a few odds and ends here and there. Tonight I was really tired but told myself I'd go out and rake just one bag of leaves and then come back in. Once I got out there, I wasn't so tired, and the one bag turned into two. (plus I saw man with stuffed tiger car drive by.) Here's another fun fact from the book: "Each garden contains an average of one hundred species of spiders and each house contains about ten species." (That's a lot of spider walks, Jana!) I think I'll revisit this book throughout the summer, especially once I have some produce for the recipes.
Hopefully by this weekend if Corrie gets the upstairs re-situated, I'll have some flower and vegetable seeds started under my grow lights. Now the fun begins!