I love a good joke. In fact, this morning I was just reminiscing about the time I put rabbit droppings in a plastic Easter egg and hyped it up hard at one of the egg hunts I had for all the kids one year. The picture I took of our friend's son, Tim, when he opened the golden egg is one of my treasured photos. (Don't worry, he got a gigantic Twix chocolate egg for his troubles).
So yes, I am all about mirth and fun, but dangit, I must say that I lacked humor when I woke up this morning and gazed out my bedroom window upon...this
But, I quickly turned my annoyance to mirth and actually laughed out loud a bit. It's actually rather common to get snow in April here in North Idaho land. I've even been snowed on in June while eating my lunch by a lovely little creek.
But I have flowers and plants I want to get into the ground. And yes, I whined that out loud, in Veruca Salt's voice!
As I am not one who likes to wallow in the self pity pool, I hurtled myself out of my domicile and went out to the greenhouse to mist all my little germinating (hopefully) seeds.
This year is going to be a even more fun out in the garden because a friend and I hatched a scheme to grow flowers, mainly for drying. I've wanted to produce more flowers for years, so adding a 1/4 acre bed of all the things from single stem sunflowers to celosia makes my heart swoon with joy.
The swooning elation continued as I opened the box from Johnny's Seed that contained my extra little order of flower seeds. Aside from a couple thousand sunflowers of the cutting variety, I also ordered celosia, strawflowers, and broom corn.
Starting the strawflowers and celosia made my whole day as it was a bit gloomy outside when I did the job. For the next few days it's supposed to be a windy, snowy, rainy, and cold mess. Then the weather is supposed to do a 180 and be like 70 degrees by next weekend.
I am not complaining, that's an awesome thing to look forward too!
Anyway, back to the strawflowers and celosia. They both have such tiny seeds! And they both need light to germinate, so I filled some flats with soil-less planting medium, broadcast the little seeds, and lightly pressed them into the planting medium.
As my plant light bulbs are burned out in my growing shelf apparatus, I decided to put the shelf in my greenhouse and put a heater out there for a couple days. We'll see if that works, but I am thinking the seeds will germinate just fine as I also covered the flats with plastic to make a little mini greenhouse effect within the greenhouse so that the flats don't dry out.
My tomato seeds also sprouted while I was in Pocatello so one of the first things that I did when I got back was to transplant those little beauties. I have to say, it's really weird and feels a bit odd to only start 50 tomato plants. I'm scaling way back on certain things this year as I want to focus on the flower production. I mean, I am still growing plenty of food, 16 tomato plants is more than a few, but to me, a person who usually grows around 80, well, it just feels a bit sparse. (The rest of the plants are for friends and family).
So, part of my morning this morning included misting tomato sprouts, all of the strawflower and celosia flats, the pepper sprouts in my window sill, and starting a flat of asters.
My aster seed is a couple years old, so I very liberally sowed the flat before pressing it down, misting it thoroughly, covering it with plastic, and placing it on top of my fridge for their germination sensation. (They tend to like germinating up there! It's probably that whole consistent temperature thing😉)
So, even though it looks a bit more like winter than spring, I am not annoyed by Nature's little April Fool's climate display. I've got baby plants sprouting and in the process of sprouting all around me! Plus, my mom dropped by some gorgeous white tulips as a thank you for watching my new little sister pup, Lucy. Every time I walk by them I smile, thanks Ma!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's never foolish iPhone. The text divider image was made in Canva and the GIF is courtesy of Tenor.