Early Signs of Spring

Here at Vintage Home and Farm, it's time to clean up the flower beds and plant more flowers!  Daffodils are already starting to come up by the barn.  Our flower beds still need additional plants to fill in the empty spaces left behind when we removed a towering laurel hedge from the space about a year and a half ago. We also have to be careful not to plant anything that the deer love, since we have many deer that come through our yard and munch on things. 

I planted three heather bushes along the walkway.  A bumblebee appeared on one of the plants while I was putting it in the ground!  Bumblebees are one of the first bees to emerge in the spring.  Incidentally, I recently learned that if you want to control wasps, hornets and yellow jackets, you need to put traps out for them as soon as there is any hint of spring (like right now).  The mated queen is the only one to survive the winter and she's out looking for a new place to build the nest. They never go back to the old one.  So, if you put several traps out now, you can hopefully catch the queens and avoid any nests being built around your house! Without a nest, there will be no further of her kind around your house.

I also planted spurges and iberis (candytuft) today. The plants are small but they should spread quite a bit, so I gave them room to grow.

Above, the poppies I planted last year look really healthy.  These plants get giant red flowers from late spring through to the end of fall.

Last year, we put our strawberry plants in pots near our front door, but the deer mowed them down repeatedly.  We were so sad.  The plants survived, and so I've moved them out to the fenced garden, where we are putting them into a couple of raised beds.  In two of the emptied pots by our front doors, I put a variety of flowers, including daffodils, grape hyacinth, johnny jump-ups, and a full-sized hyacinth.  

Yellow crocuses (below) are blooming along the path near the front door as well. These were the first flowers to open.

Have you gotten outside to look for signs of spring?  Flowers are a great way to brighten up a yard.  To bring some cheer indoors, fill a vase with a couple of budding tree branches (plum is starting to bloom here), or clip a few daffodils to put on your table, mantle or kitchen window.

Out along the Morse Creek trail by our home, the osoberry or Indian plum shrubs are beginning to get their leaves.  These shrubs are native to our area and are among the first in the spring to leaf out.