buds

Took some pictures of buds in my yard the other day. The Clematis has quite a few! I'm glad it's alive and going to bloom, but disappointed I didn't dig it up early enough to move nearer the house. Sigh. Maybe next year.

The Peony isn't very large yet but it has buds already. This one, too, I wanted to dig up early- to divide in half. O well. Next year.

I found lots of fat buds on my Sage! I'm curious to see the flowers, but also want the plant to grow more foliage, so cut most of them off.

It has been very dry. I haven't seen any rain in three weeks. My husband used to laugh at me for re-using water but now he tells me some areas of our country are suffering from water shortages. So I pour the baby's bathwater (never very dirty) on my hostas, newly-transplanted cosmos, crepe myrtles and daylilies. I put greywater from dishwashing on the strawberries, rhubarb and herb bed. I've got some containers sitting in sinks to catch water from handwashing, too- for all the potted plants, apple trees and seedlings on the patio. It feels like an inconvenience to some, but I collect ten to fifteen gallons of water a day this way, and it takes care of half my watering. Every other day, or every third day, I soak the garden beds on the north side of the yard with the hose (furthest from the door, so I don't want to haul water that far).

Usually our springtime is full of heavy rains and I worry about leaks flooding my mudroom, young plants in the garden getting washed away. This year I worry about it all drying up. I'm really dreading what the summer will be like. It was 88 degrees yesterday!

The good thing is that because there is no standing water, no puddles anywhere, there are no mosquitoes!