Nonstop wind and off and on rain here for the past 3 days. We did not get the worst of it; the major storm went south to north and actually split east-west and missed us. Just west of us there was a tornado warning; here, the worst we saw were some new leaves torn off trees.
This morning (Saturday) is very heavy overcast but the wind has died down. The NWS is predicting "gusty" winds today, but no more rain so I may take a chance with a load of laundry.
Remember I said I was helping a friend move house? Seeing the tons of stuff she had accumulated and was consequently getting rid of really opened my eyes. Yesterday I cleaned out the office closet and got rid of 5 boxes of old gardening magazines I've been saving since god alone knows when. I leafed thru a few: blurry pictures, out of date information, and "news" about plants that have since become *yawn* soooo jejeune, darling. The debate now is over a very heavy box of old National Geographics. At first I thought save at least some of very old ones (1952), but now I'm thinking I'll just toss the whole lot. Everybody says "Oh they are collectible!" but nobody actually wants them.
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Got more nice stones for the Folly Wall raised bed. The township did a little grading along a nearby road and scraped out a lot of stones, some of which are perfect size/shape for my project. I may go back again today and get a few more. I really want to finish that retaining wall bed; as it stands, instead of making progress there, I'm actually behind because I had to dismantle the wall.
Green. Everything is suddenly so green you want to grab a fork and eat it. The veg is getting behind but the soil is so saturated I don't want to try to work it. I have heavy clay and working it when wet is a disaster. Got my red Pontiac potatoes in on Thursday morning; peas are up and growing nicely. Asparagus is starting to shoot; I think I have a few spears that are big enough to harvest 
I need to get some feed on those plants.
Which reminds me. I'm going to make up a few notes and every time I go past a local house with a horse I'm going to leave a note asking if they have manure I could have. My steady source of lovely horse manure is gone and altho I'm making do with my hen's product, nothing, in King Charles III's words, "is better than good rotted horse manure."
Indoors, my old Moonflower seeds germinated beautifully; I now have more moonflower seedlings than I need, but that's ok. I can find room. Marigolds and Cosmos are germinated; still waiting to see if the zinnias will come up. I'm trying to use up old seed from 2020. I'm going to be ruthless and toss everything that's 2020; I'm tired of wasting time with old seed that has given up the ghost.
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Saw a report on "urban wastelands" in the UK, city areas where there's nothing much green, and how residents are taking it on themselves in to transform waste spaces into community gardens. In one area, neighbors cleaned up a garbage-filled alley and made it into a lovely garden. This got me thinking; we hear a lot about urban wastelands, but nobody in the US really notices the "suburban" and even "rural" wastelands all around. Acres on acres of mowed grass, maybe a tree or two, and nothing else. The neighborhood I live in was divided into 2-acre lots when we all bought and built. Of about 20 lots, I have the ONLY vegetable garden. Most of the other properties are just grass and widely spaced trees. And most of the trees are only there by accident. Think of all the beauty, biodiversity, and wildlife habitat that is missing! As a nation, we really need to encourage more people to create gardens. I'm not suggesting everyone put in a highly productive veg patch; it's a lot of work and I know most people don't have the time or inclination. But somehow we should promote more low-maintenance landscape planting: mulched islands of trees and shrubs to provide beauty, shade, and wildlife cover. I think it's important that we as gardeners get the word out there that gardening doesn't have to be back-breaking, exhausting work or even very expensive. I remember when I offered some daffodil bulbs to my neighbor she asked if I'd plant them because she was afraid it would be too much for her; I had to assure her that all she needed to do was dig a hole and drop them in. We need to educate others--- and here's a shout-out to SlowCala for her efforts. It sounds like she's encouraging a whole neighborhood of gardeners! 
Let's take a lesson and do likewise.
Hen run posts are in and door is permanently in place. All the netting is re-attached and we are back in business. I need to spread out the compost in the hen run so the girls can get scratching. All that is left of that project is to backfill around the new door post and re-set that concrete threshold that I uncovered when digging out the old posts.
Did our first lawn mowing of the season. Everything looks much nicer now. For some reason, this year, we had big tall thick clumps of grass coming up randomly. I've noticed almost every year we have some small vigorous clumps, which I attribute to "better nutrition" from the hens free-ranging and free-pooping all over the place. But we've never seen anything like this!
Today I got five more buckets of dirt from E's back yard pile and finished filling up the platform that the wireframe deer stands on. Now I just need to plant some small-leaved ivy in it and train that to cover the deer frame. Hey presto: topiary deer. I hope.
Got two very big, very flat, very nice stones for the Folly Wall. I set the biggest on the top of the rebuilt south facing wall and my gosh, what an instant improvement! It was as if that stone was made for that spot. Perfect fit. The second slightly smaller stone went onto the top of the other raised bed and again, big improvement. I'm hoping to completely rebuild the north-facing wall of the north raised bed tomorrow, if we don't get the heavy rain being predicted. (I had to take that wall down to remove and reset the preformed pond.)
And finally, did *gulp* my income taxes and got everything sent off and paid for. It's always nerve-wracking but I tell myself if I wants to drive on roads without ruts, I pays my taxes. 
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Spring is shaking out her tresses everywhere. My pink flowering crabapple is blossoming and the smell always takes me right back to senior high prom and my best friend Kenny Kist. 
These are the days when I feel like all I do is walk up and down that hill. I KNOW I'm busy, but it always feels like I'm not getting anything accomplished. Then, at the end of the day, when I think back, I realize I DID get a lot done, but mostly it's those little things that add up, that would have become big things if I hadn't attended to them.
Yesterday felt like a "nothing" day, but I got the water iris from the Folly Pond cleaned up, divided, and replanted in the pond. The divisions are in a bucket; I'm going to keep some of them for the Pot Corral display and re-home the rest once I'm sure they are the native Louisiana Game Cock iris and not the European yellow water iris.
I reattached the door onto the hen run, temporarily, so I could see where the other door post needed to go. Then I cleared out the hole for that post. There's a pad of concrete at the bottom of that hole from a long-previous post and it has a divot in the middle that is collecting water and that's what probly led the last post to rot and break over. So I poured a little concrete into the divot to fill it.
I got a fairly big dead limb sawed off the mulberry tree that shades the hen run. That tree could use another good going over, but not at this time of year. The sap is rising and even cutting off that mostly dead limb caused a lot of dripping.
I reattached the wire netting to the back of the hen run, to the new post that I set last week.
And I pulled out a few more patches of winter cress in the South Border. All this in light of the fact that I spent 2 hours helping a friend move. I thought I was only there to move some big houseplants, but ended up making two trips with lots of other stuff as well. She's only moving a few miles, so not a big deal.
Today we're mowing the lawn for the first time this year. I'm hoping to get that second post set up early this morning, then get the mower out once the grass has dried off. It's going to be a bear; the grass on the hillside behind the house is really deep in patches.
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Definitely going to sort out the seed box and get rid of a lot of old (4 years) packets. I've got sage, rosemary, lettuce, chinese cabbage, and a few other things that are showing no signs of germination. I'll keep those flats going for another week but I'm tossing the remaining packets. The lettuce and chinese cabbage should have been leaping out of the ground by now.
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Eclipse was dramatic. We did not have totality, but it got very dim and only a crescent of the sun was visible for a while. We had very dark welding lenses to view through. Did not observe any odd behaviors in my cats or hens; the wild birds got a bit louder for a while when it was darkest, I think they thought evening was approaching. Such a strange, eerie light! Something utterly unique; it did not look like dawn light or twilight, it did not even look like that strange, sickly storm light that comes with thunder. Just a unique and ominous sort of flat dead orange-tawny light. It is no wonder people take eclipses as portents of dire times to come.
It's amazing how one day of sunshine and mild weather can make all the difference. Yesterday (Sunday 7 April) felt more like "Easter" than last Sunday, which was actually Easter. I finally dug out that failing azalea from the Front Border and replaced it with a 'Wine and Roses' weigela and planted a 'Spilled Wine' weigela (a new shorter, more prostrate variety) in front of it. Both are in shades of pink/mauve/purple so should look good together. To make room, I also moved a small hydrangea down along the border, where it will get more sun and hopefully start to show some blooms. It's now in the spot where the Siberian iris were lifted; I've decided to move those across the path to fill in a gap left when I removed two big nasty thorny barberries from the end of the hedge. What a relief to have those gone! I felt bad digging them out and destroying them, but they were terrible to work around, especially after R trimmed the hedge and cut the barberries to form the end of the hedge. Those clippings were murder, no matter how carefully we raked them up.
My Romaine lettuce seeds are germinated, as are the okra seeds. I potted on the second flat of coleus; only a few are showing any color yet, but I'm still hopeful.
My lily bulbs of various kinds are just now appearing above the soil. I'm going to put in supports for them NOW instead of waiting for the tall stems to start leaning over.
And speaking of supports....I scored a big one! My friend is clearing out her house/garage in prep to move and she had two boxes (50 each) of wire lawn sign supports. Those upside down squared U-shaped wire thingys that you can slide signs onto, mostly for election type signs, but also construction and yard care companies use them. They make excellent plant supports and are just generally very handy around the garden. the wire is heavy enough to stand up to handling, but flexible enough to be bent into shape. You can also get lighter weight H-shaped wire supports for signs and although they can be helpful in a pinch, they aren't as good as the U-shaped ones (also, can be dangerous with those uprights sticking up).
This morning I'm heading up to the hen run to start working on setting that second post (Finally!). If I can just determine the post length and get it cut, that will be a big step forward. It's been so sloppy wet and muddy I haven't been able to do anything with this vital project.
And while I'm up there I "mightaswell" get those water iris back into the pond in the Folly Wall garden.
We'll be experiencing the solar eclipse this afternoon around 2-4:30 pm. We're not in the path of totality, but pretty near, so should be a good show. I baked "eclipse cookies" yesterday: basic sugar cookies, but I made a roll of dough with cocoa powder to make it dark, then wrapped that roll in a sheet of plain white dough. Refrigerated, then cut them into circles: dark center with light rim. Kind of cute!
Totally unmotivated. It's cold. It's wet. It's windy. The entire property is soggy. My big gardening accomplishment yesterday was finally getting the Front Border tidied and pulling a small patch of winter cress in the South Border. By the end of that half hour, my fingers were numb, my feet were wet despite boots, and I felt like I'd never be warm again. Today looks like a reprise of the same. At least there's a bit of sun. I've got a ton of laundry to get out, first load is churning away even as we speak. I miss my old washing machine. That bugger could turn out a clean load in about 30 minutes, start to finish, and you could toss in whatever at any time throughout the cycle. This "improved" scybalum I have now takes FOREVER to do a load and the lid locks after the wash cycle. It won't fill while the lid is up. Who comes up with these things? I long for my mom's old wringer washer that we filled with a hose and emptied into the floor drain. In a pinch or on a good day, we could even roll it outside and do the laundry on the back porch.
On a brighter note, I've got more flats of seeds started in the kitchen. Lettuce, okra, chinese cabbage, sage, and oregano. Those last three are iffy. The seeds are from 2020 and I don't know how vital they are. Today I'm making up flats for my annual flowers: marigolds, zinnias, cosmos and amaranth (Love Lies Bleeding...creepy name, creepy flower, but I saw it in a "jungle" garden and it's creepiness worked beautifully). I'm holding off on starting the castor beans, morning glories and calendula (may just direct sow those last two), and the sunflowers; I think those will go in next week.
Today I'm going to try an experiment with catmint cuttings. I have fair success getting catmint cuttings to root in water, but I have some fibrous blocks of something that looks sort of like fiberglass batting and I want to try rooting some cuttings in that. I was given a whole wodge of these little yellow blocks several years ago and they've sat in the greenhouse doing nothing. The instructions say to soak them, squeeze out excess, insert the cuttings, put everything into something that will retain moisture, and hey, presto...rooted cuttings. We'll see.
