My gardening ethos has always been "can I find it for cheap/free?" Yesterday, *gulp* I actually spent....*shudder* money on something. I got a big load of (FREE) bricks that I want to lay down around the Pond. But I think that having the pond edged in native rocks will look a bit odd set against the formality of a brick path. So I've been trying to find some sort of "formal" looking edging for the pond and I found it yesterday at Lowe's. These curved concrete edgers that look like cobblestone paving. I .... bought.... them. They aren't perfect; their radius is smaller than the overall radius of the 8-foot diameter pond, but they will work and I think they will give me the look I want.
Got my Yukon Gold potatoes in the ground yesterday. The veg is saturated; I may be able to put in more potatoes later today, but other things will have to wait. Peas are up and doing well; I think I'll take off the protective fencing cages and put them onto regular "pea brush" support twigs.
Asparagus! For the first time in YEARS, I harvested asparagus. I got five nice spears and there are at least a few more coming on. Lots of little first-year spears, but only a few big enough to harvest. I am really surprised that the plants I put in last summer are doing so well; they are already equal in size to most of the 2-year plants.
Cleaned up a bit more in the Asian Garden, but the past couple days have been "run around" days, where I wasn't home much, doing errands. The To-Do list keeps getting longer.
Saturday I worked at finishing up the Folly Wall raised bed and it looks great. I got my husband to come on a "liberation run" to bring home an enormous long, flat stone and it went on as the capstone to finish that dismantled and rebuilt north wall of the raised bed. Job done. Raised bed looks good, pond looks reasonably level, and I moved forward by planting two nice little creeping phlox into the raised bed and then clearing off the area just below it and moving in clumps of Lamb's Ear (Stachys bizantina). Finally, a little forward progress there again.
I found that the old utility sink that I have set into the corner of the south raised bed is badly cracked. So much for that as a water feature. I was going to remove it, then decided to fit a smaller container inside it and backfill around it with soil. I can use the smaller container to hold water for a water plant (like papyrus or reeds) and the backfilled edge can hold bog plants that like it soggy but not standing water (like marsh marigold). I was lucky enough to get 4 plastic storage totes/tubs at Goodwill for only $3 each (they are missing lids, but I don't care about that). One of them is small enough to fit inside the sink; I want to put another one down (black plastic) into the soil next to the sink and THAT will be the water feature. Once I get some plants growing around the containers to disguise the edges it should look good.
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Sunday was beautiful; still breezy and far too hot (we got to 80F) for mid-April, but I gave myself up to a day of "peripatetic gardening." Instead of following any sort of plan or to-do list, I put on my tool belt and gloves and just wandered all over the place, doing whatever came to hand. I LOVE this sort of gardening. This is gardening as it should be, for me. I moved a few hyacinths to close to the deck steps (where I can enjoy their fragrance next spring), put some baby hostas into the ground in the Grape Arbor garden, put two more into pots for the Pot Corral. When the sun got a bit too intense, I concentrated on tidying up the Grape Arbor garden and worked my way back as far as the Asian Garden.
We had thunderstorms roll through last night and some rain. I've got a deadline project to work on, the world is very wet right now, and I dont' know if I'll get into the garden today. If I do, I'll pick up where I left off, tidying the Asian Garden (lots of Annual bluegrass (Poa annua)).
My Bibb lettuce is up and growing. I moved the tomato plants into the greenhouse yesterday to begin their hardening off period. I still need to move a lot of stuff out of the greenhouse and get it better organized. it's really filling up with plants now!
Nonstop wind and off and on rain here for the past 3 days. We did not get the worst of it; the major storm went south to north and actually split east-west and missed us. Just west of us there was a tornado warning; here, the worst we saw were some new leaves torn off trees.
This morning (Saturday) is very heavy overcast but the wind has died down. The NWS is predicting "gusty" winds today, but no more rain so I may take a chance with a load of laundry.
Remember I said I was helping a friend move house? Seeing the tons of stuff she had accumulated and was consequently getting rid of really opened my eyes. Yesterday I cleaned out the office closet and got rid of 5 boxes of old gardening magazines I've been saving since god alone knows when. I leafed thru a few: blurry pictures, out of date information, and "news" about plants that have since become *yawn* soooo jejeune, darling. The debate now is over a very heavy box of old National Geographics. At first I thought save at least some of very old ones (1952), but now I'm thinking I'll just toss the whole lot. Everybody says "Oh they are collectible!" but nobody actually wants them.
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Got more nice stones for the Folly Wall raised bed. The township did a little grading along a nearby road and scraped out a lot of stones, some of which are perfect size/shape for my project. I may go back again today and get a few more. I really want to finish that retaining wall bed; as it stands, instead of making progress there, I'm actually behind because I had to dismantle the wall.
Green. Everything is suddenly so green you want to grab a fork and eat it. The veg is getting behind but the soil is so saturated I don't want to try to work it. I have heavy clay and working it when wet is a disaster. Got my red Pontiac potatoes in on Thursday morning; peas are up and growing nicely. Asparagus is starting to shoot; I think I have a few spears that are big enough to harvest 
I need to get some feed on those plants.
Which reminds me. I'm going to make up a few notes and every time I go past a local house with a horse I'm going to leave a note asking if they have manure I could have. My steady source of lovely horse manure is gone and altho I'm making do with my hen's product, nothing, in King Charles III's words, "is better than good rotted horse manure."
Indoors, my old Moonflower seeds germinated beautifully; I now have more moonflower seedlings than I need, but that's ok. I can find room. Marigolds and Cosmos are germinated; still waiting to see if the zinnias will come up. I'm trying to use up old seed from 2020. I'm going to be ruthless and toss everything that's 2020; I'm tired of wasting time with old seed that has given up the ghost.
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Saw a report on "urban wastelands" in the UK, city areas where there's nothing much green, and how residents are taking it on themselves in to transform waste spaces into community gardens. In one area, neighbors cleaned up a garbage-filled alley and made it into a lovely garden. This got me thinking; we hear a lot about urban wastelands, but nobody in the US really notices the "suburban" and even "rural" wastelands all around. Acres on acres of mowed grass, maybe a tree or two, and nothing else. The neighborhood I live in was divided into 2-acre lots when we all bought and built. Of about 20 lots, I have the ONLY vegetable garden. Most of the other properties are just grass and widely spaced trees. And most of the trees are only there by accident. Think of all the beauty, biodiversity, and wildlife habitat that is missing! As a nation, we really need to encourage more people to create gardens. I'm not suggesting everyone put in a highly productive veg patch; it's a lot of work and I know most people don't have the time or inclination. But somehow we should promote more low-maintenance landscape planting: mulched islands of trees and shrubs to provide beauty, shade, and wildlife cover. I think it's important that we as gardeners get the word out there that gardening doesn't have to be back-breaking, exhausting work or even very expensive. I remember when I offered some daffodil bulbs to my neighbor she asked if I'd plant them because she was afraid it would be too much for her; I had to assure her that all she needed to do was dig a hole and drop them in. We need to educate others--- and here's a shout-out to SlowCala for her efforts. It sounds like she's encouraging a whole neighborhood of gardeners! 
Let's take a lesson and do likewise.
Hen run posts are in and door is permanently in place. All the netting is re-attached and we are back in business. I need to spread out the compost in the hen run so the girls can get scratching. All that is left of that project is to backfill around the new door post and re-set that concrete threshold that I uncovered when digging out the old posts.
Did our first lawn mowing of the season. Everything looks much nicer now. For some reason, this year, we had big tall thick clumps of grass coming up randomly. I've noticed almost every year we have some small vigorous clumps, which I attribute to "better nutrition" from the hens free-ranging and free-pooping all over the place. But we've never seen anything like this!
Today I got five more buckets of dirt from E's back yard pile and finished filling up the platform that the wireframe deer stands on. Now I just need to plant some small-leaved ivy in it and train that to cover the deer frame. Hey presto: topiary deer. I hope.
Got two very big, very flat, very nice stones for the Folly Wall. I set the biggest on the top of the rebuilt south facing wall and my gosh, what an instant improvement! It was as if that stone was made for that spot. Perfect fit. The second slightly smaller stone went onto the top of the other raised bed and again, big improvement. I'm hoping to completely rebuild the north-facing wall of the north raised bed tomorrow, if we don't get the heavy rain being predicted. (I had to take that wall down to remove and reset the preformed pond.)
And finally, did *gulp* my income taxes and got everything sent off and paid for. It's always nerve-wracking but I tell myself if I wants to drive on roads without ruts, I pays my taxes. 
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Spring is shaking out her tresses everywhere. My pink flowering crabapple is blossoming and the smell always takes me right back to senior high prom and my best friend Kenny Kist. 
These are the days when I feel like all I do is walk up and down that hill. I KNOW I'm busy, but it always feels like I'm not getting anything accomplished. Then, at the end of the day, when I think back, I realize I DID get a lot done, but mostly it's those little things that add up, that would have become big things if I hadn't attended to them.
Yesterday felt like a "nothing" day, but I got the water iris from the Folly Pond cleaned up, divided, and replanted in the pond. The divisions are in a bucket; I'm going to keep some of them for the Pot Corral display and re-home the rest once I'm sure they are the native Louisiana Game Cock iris and not the European yellow water iris.
I reattached the door onto the hen run, temporarily, so I could see where the other door post needed to go. Then I cleared out the hole for that post. There's a pad of concrete at the bottom of that hole from a long-previous post and it has a divot in the middle that is collecting water and that's what probly led the last post to rot and break over. So I poured a little concrete into the divot to fill it.
I got a fairly big dead limb sawed off the mulberry tree that shades the hen run. That tree could use another good going over, but not at this time of year. The sap is rising and even cutting off that mostly dead limb caused a lot of dripping.
I reattached the wire netting to the back of the hen run, to the new post that I set last week.
And I pulled out a few more patches of winter cress in the South Border. All this in light of the fact that I spent 2 hours helping a friend move. I thought I was only there to move some big houseplants, but ended up making two trips with lots of other stuff as well. She's only moving a few miles, so not a big deal.
Today we're mowing the lawn for the first time this year. I'm hoping to get that second post set up early this morning, then get the mower out once the grass has dried off. It's going to be a bear; the grass on the hillside behind the house is really deep in patches.
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Definitely going to sort out the seed box and get rid of a lot of old (4 years) packets. I've got sage, rosemary, lettuce, chinese cabbage, and a few other things that are showing no signs of germination. I'll keep those flats going for another week but I'm tossing the remaining packets. The lettuce and chinese cabbage should have been leaping out of the ground by now.
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Eclipse was dramatic. We did not have totality, but it got very dim and only a crescent of the sun was visible for a while. We had very dark welding lenses to view through. Did not observe any odd behaviors in my cats or hens; the wild birds got a bit louder for a while when it was darkest, I think they thought evening was approaching. Such a strange, eerie light! Something utterly unique; it did not look like dawn light or twilight, it did not even look like that strange, sickly storm light that comes with thunder. Just a unique and ominous sort of flat dead orange-tawny light. It is no wonder people take eclipses as portents of dire times to come.
