Spring!!!

I love when plants start coming up in the spring! It always amazes me that after all of the cold and snow; spring comes and plants start popping up! It is a beautiful sight to see flowers blooming, green grass and trees pushing out leaves; a great reminder of the blessings of life!

Last year we planted some bare-root strawberry plants and were excited to see that they took root and grew. Late in the fall they started to die back and go dormant, my wonderful in-laws brought us some straw that we needed to cover them during the winter. Somewhere around late March or early April we started to see green leaves come out :) and now this is what we have:

Strawberry plants!!!!! I hope they continue to do well and that we can get a decent crop of strawberries this year. I still need to build a cage for them in order to keep the birds and rabbits from eating the precious strawberries that grow, hopefully I can get that done in the next couple weeks.

We also started some seedlings to grow stuff in our garden this year (we still need to haul some more cinder blocks for that). So far they are doing well. We started seeds for tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, sweet and hot peppers, cabbage and a few other things. Here are our 1 and a half week old seedlings:

This year will be mostly an experiment to see what grows well in our garden. As long as something (other than weeds) grow in it I will be happy :)

I have wanted to grow some herbs indoors for awhile now. However, our punk cat likes to eat anything plantlike that resides in our house (including pineapples). I am not opposed to growing herbs outside, except that it leaves me without fresh herbs in the fall and winter. I came up with a solution :) I got some hanging baskets at the Dollar Store and am going to plant them with herbs and hang them in front of our kitchen window. Jules could make it up to them, but hopefully will not. Right now I have the baskets hanging from the blinds until I can put the hooks in the ceiling, so I'll post a picture later. But for now, here are our little basil seedlings:

We had snow the other week, but the strawberries seem fine, we also planted some raspberries that seem okay so far. I am looking forward to some more home improvements this summer and hoping I can develop some sort of green thumb!