Hummingbird Hello!

A welcome rainy day brought a lovely surprise. A hummingbird stopped and hovered just outside the living room window. What a terrific first hummingbird sighting . It was almost as if he just stopped to say, "Hello,I'm back".

The whole garden is happy with the rain. Now we begin our days of salads from the garden. We can glide right past salad greens in the grocery store with glee. The new lettuce and our fall planted spinach are beginning to produce. The house salad here requires a tour of the garden. I pick a few lettuce leaves , some spinach,a little Good King Henry,chives, perhaps some sweet cicely or chervil, Johnny jump up flowers or violets, a sprig of French tarragon, some salad burnett. With a salad like that a little raspberry vinaigrette is all we need for dressing. Now that's a garden salad! But something is missing, I need to plant my arugula. I'll move that to the top of the list for tomorrow.

Over Wintered Spinach

Melting snow revealed growing spinach. Results like this are chancy. Continuous snow cover is credited for this first green crop. Left over spinach seed should be freely planted every fall. We need to tend to this task here. A large spinach patch could be ours if only we had completed this simple task. Every year we resolve to plant fall spinach in abundance. Prepare the ground, plant the seed and harvest the crop before it is time to plant the following year's beans. Fall planted spinach bolts quickly but there is a narrow window for early fresh greens. Young plants are more likely to overwinter. Predicting the time of ground freeze is inexact at best. Several fall plantings of spinach would improve the chances of spring survivors. Will the delight of fresh spinach salad now make us remember to plant spinach this fall? I hope so!