My Spring Garden

I’ve just come in from working outside. This is an absolutely beautiful Florida spring day-warm, sunny, with a nice breeze. I’ve had cardinals, painted buntings, doves and blue jays on the feeder and yelling at me for disturbing them.
Eggplant, tomatoes and red bell peppers are snug in their 5-gallon pots, freshly fertilized and watered. All the herbs have had some fresh soil and fertilizer worked in around them. Five pineapple plants have fruit on them, and the roses have been fed.

This is my first year to try vegetables in pots, so I’m very hopeful that we will actually have tomatoes that taste like tomatoes this year! I will have to be vigilant as the squirrels are very determined adversaries, and seem to think that I grow things for especially for them!

Having grown up in the midwest, this is the time of year that I miss the spring flowers: crocus, tulips, forsythia, lilies of the valley, lilacs, etc. However, my roses and hibiscus are blooming, my herbs and pineapples doing beautifully, and the frangipani are bursting with leaves while I watch.  The tropical wisteria has bloomed gorgeously already and is beginning to bloom again.  Here is a picture of it at it’s very best from a couple of springs ago:

My garden is definitely not the same as the northern gardens I grew up with, or the English gardens I love to see.  However, the pleasures are the same, especially at this time of year.  There is something special about working with plants in the spring sunshine, a continuation from the past.  From time immemorial, planting in the spring has been a hopeful activity, a celebration of the end of winter looking forward to the harvest to come.