Spring Happenings

What with working on the 2nd bedroom and having visitors and preparing for the baby, I've forgotten to post a million times about my gardening.  Lucky you.  So I'm fixing that today.  This year, since the 2nd bedroom has a different purpose than it did last year, we didn't put my plants upstairs.  Instead, we had to figure out something for the basement.  So we ordered a couple of heat mats and rigged the lights to hang from the ceiling over the workbench and this is what it turned out like.

So far, I've had immense success with some seeds and complete failure with others, just like last year.  One of the great successes are the free tomato seeds I got, which are going to Shelbee next time I see her.  I just transplanted them, so they're all ready to go to their new home.  See?

 A few weeks ago, I was looking back at pictures from the same time last year, and realized that my tulip bulbs came up mid-March.  I admit, I was skeptical this year.  Until about a week ago, we still had 3 feet of snow on the ground.  But lo and behold, when the snow melted, I went to check the flower beds, and there were the bulbs starting to come up!

So I just noticed that the camera cord thingy must have swung in front of the camera as I was taking the picture.  Please disregard that and look at the plants instead!  Not only are the bulbs coming up thicker than last year, but there are actually a few other things that survived the horrendous winter out here.  The forget-me-nots are alive and well (bottom right), which is good, since their's was a massive failure in the seed department this year.  I guess they don't like the basement.  Also, they don't flower the first year they're planted, so I was hoping they would survive so I could see what they actually look like. 

Another to survive was my flax, which was a huge surprise.

Let's hope it does a little better than last year.  It was pretty spindly and didn't flower much.  But it looks like it's thicker and healthier already.  Some other things that came back were the canterbury bells (also a no-go in the flowering-the-first-year department, so I'm excited about that), the echinacea (hopefully - it looked like it was alive when I was cleaning out the dead stuff from last year - also not much flowering the first year), my thyme, sage, oregano and chives.  So all in all, it was a good turn out.  I guess we'll see what happens as spring progresses.