How fitting that the iris outside our front door decided to open this morning! I’m loving the warmer weather lately and the later sunsets. I’m so happy that we’re heading into spring and anticipating the spring wildflower blooms around the state.

Almost a year ago I wrote over on Sprout Dispatch about starting a mushroom log. Yesterday I took a walkabout in the yard with Forest as it was our first bit of sunshine in nearly a week. I spotted that the mushroom log had sprouted mushrooms. Unsure if they were from the plugs or if they were just random mushrooms from the yard I mentioned it to Chris who confirmed they were the edible kind. Unfortunately I caught them past their prime and they were still quite small, however I’m happy to know that I may be eating mushrooms on a semi-frequent basis in the near future. And it only…

Chris has been managing the vegetable garden for the last three months. He’s been great at tending the new seedlings, ripping out weeds, and lamenting the poor harvest of sweet potatoes. Next year—that’ll be our year for sweet potatoes and garlic—we hope. The luffa was bit back by frost with the fruits ready to harvest. We should have plenty of dried sponges to share once again this year. The brown cotton managed to survive my neglect this summer, going on to flower and produce the fluffy cotton bits you see below. It’ll die back with the freeze but I wonder if it’ll resurrect from the roots come spring. I had…

The overgrown and weedy section near the bees. When I stole 10 minutes the other day to wander around the yard I also tinkered in the garden for a few minutes. My time spent enjoying the garden is practically non-existent now that the weather has turned cooler, the daylight is short, and I have returned to work. Weekends are spent trying to catch up on chores in the house and keeping the baby fed, changed, and happy. Gardening? What is that? Despite being a little sad that winter is coming, I’m glad at the same time—I can just abandon the garden and not worry about it until spring. I can’t…

I was thrilled that this year the roselle plants (Hibiscus sabdariffa) grew enthusiastically, almost too much so. Frankly, and I knew it at the time, they were planted too close to a few other plants and ended up shading those plants out. Next year I’m thinking that maybe they deserve to be in the perennial herb beds instead, just to give them more room and sun. Last weekend I decided to trim back the branches that had fallen over and were heavily shading out our variegated hydrangea. I clipped off most of the calyces, the red pods on the stalks, and they lingered there for several days until I could…

The area where the brug’s are has turned into a complete jungle. The brug’s themselves were over 10′ tall at one point this summer, but the weight of the stems has caused them to lean over to the ground. I really need to clean up this area of the garden—and forget looking near the bees, it is absolutely overgrown with weeds. I avoided going over there while pregnant and Chris was too busy working on the guest room and Forest’s room this summer to get over there and weed. Perhaps it is time to dig out the bee suit and clean up over there! The bottle gourd in the vegetable…

My parents were down for the weekend which meant that Forest had two people who wanted to give him attention so yesterday I was able to spend almost two hours piddling in the garden. I first took some time to trim up the roselle bush that had fallen over and started shading out our variegated hydrangea. I clipped off all of the red calyxes from the branches I trimmed back so I could make hibiscus tea from them—more on that later this week. Then I began weeding and trimming the flower bed directly in front of the house, which was/is still quite overgrown. I’ll try to get out more this…