To Spring Or Not To Spring....

The weather just cannot make up its mind, can it? This last bout with trying to defeat winter brought us an icy rain. The farther north we drove last Thursday night, the more winter won. We had about two inches of heavy wet snow before arriving home. Our yard is a casualty of that battle. It's definitely wintry.

There are a few nice things about this newest snow cover: 1) it covers all the dead leaves on the lawn; 2) it sparkles in the sunlight; 3) it's full of much needed moisture; and 4) it makes it very easy for me to ignore all those downed tree branches that need picking up. It also shows us that the wildlife still gives us regular visits. We actually saw the two deer leaving tracks as they hit up my lilac hedge the other day. From the size of them, we judge them to be last summer's fawns. And while I haven't actually seen our bunny lately, he's left tracks atop the new snow. (I'm sure I'll find his calling cards much later.)

My indoor plants are answering the siren song of spring. As expected, the Easter amaryllis bloom isn't going to make it to Easter: it's already dried up and rather ugly. But the shooting star Hoya is shooting like crazy. There are six different clusters of dragon-head-looking blossom clusters in various stages of opening.

The geraniums, while still leggy, are filling out nicely again. One even has a stem of flowers forming. The begonias that share the huge outdoor planters I drug inside last fall are also a bit leggy but forming flower buds. One plant will be red while the other two are going to be a deeper red bordering on maroon. Just now I noticed one of my Pearls of Opar is sending up a stem to flower. Those blooms will be pink and tiny, smaller than the resulting seed pods will be.

I'd recently lamented the clivia miniata (bush lily) fooling me with captured detritus such that I thought it was going to bloom. That plant is now named Clovia since my phone constantly defeats my attempts to type clivia at every opportunity. Anyway, it has taken pity on me and is shooting up its own flower stalk. Mine will produce bright orange trumpet-shaped blossoms in a circle atop a single stem (There are other colors of these lilies I discovered when researching the plant.)

I might not be home to witness the flowers opening as I'm soon to be in Florida again, although not for hockey. Our middle daughter has a surgical event coming up. I'll try to be a help to her. At the very least, I'll be able to water her overabundance of plants. Dennis has promised to send me photos of Clovia in all her glory while I'm away. He does so love all my successes with flowers.

Besides noticing all the new spring growth in the house, I'm venturing into trying my hand at hydroponics. I've had a couple plant shoots I brought home from our daughter's plants in January that were still rooting in small containers of water. I have an opened bag of clay pebbles I'd bought to use on the pebble trays under plants to raise humidity near them. The bag they came in said they're for hydroponics, as well as drip trays. Since those particular shoots seem to be fine with growing in just water, I "planted" them in the clay pebbles in slightly larger containers. I did that mainly because the paper towels I'd initially used was getting ugly and stinky.

Since I was messing with the clay pebbles, I decided to also "plant" my sprouted avocado seed the same way. It had been languishing, wrapped in a damp paper towel, inside a sandwich baggie. The sprout was getting deformed by being restrained. I did put that seed back into the bedding plant plastic starter pot so I'll easily be able to transfer it to actual potting soil and a planter sometime in the future.

My huge pothos is also going nuts, so I clipped off two long strands of leaves, then cut those each in two, removing a few leaves. Those went into a glass vase filled with the clay pebbles and water to root. Eventually I'll use the same method to start my other vines to use this summer as fillers in the planters. But I'll hold off on doing that until I'm home again. I do love spring and growing things.