Feeling more like spring every day

It was a beautiful weekend with lots of sun, but still a bit cool, especially in the shade.

Onions are coming up.

Pea fence and peas (well, haven't sprouted yet, but they are planted). Also some kale that survived and one broccoli plant. We had some of the kale on homemade pizza last week and it was very good. 

And raspberries are already leafing out!

I transplanted some strawberry plants into these leftover planters and hung them off my grape arbor. Hanging the strawberries up off the ground should:

1. keep the slugs from eating them
2. control how much water they get
3. make them easier to pick

I saw this on a farm tour last summer (except they had planted the strawberry plants in large diameter PVC pipe). Below and in front of these planters is the strawberry bed - we had so many berries last year that we still have some frozen that we are eating now with our breakfast cereal.

 
 Now for some flowers of spring. The first crocuses:

They are even in the front lawn (well, we planted them there actually)! See if you can find the lone purple one.

This is as far as I can tell a Siberian Iris that blooms in early spring - please correct me if I am wrong.

Mulch that we created last weekend from all the pruning we did. It's so handy to have your own shredder even though it is a lot of hard, dusty, noisy work. And amazing how a huge pile of branches shreds down to just this much mulch.

Finally a quick shot of our pond being deconstructed yet again. This is a photo from last Sunday when I had started to remove all the edging stones and empty the pond of water. This weekend we further emptied out the pond of water and lots of small stones that the racoons knocked off the shelves into the pond. We also removed the pump and collapsed the whole liner into the middle and started working on flattening out one shelf to make the pond deeper all the way across. Very heavy clay soil, so we gave up after a few hours of shovelling - there's always next weekend to continue this project!

I still have to dormant spray my fruit trees - really hard to plan for that without having an accurate weather forecast you can rely on. Hopefully we'll have a few days without rain, wind or freezing temperatures soon!