Up early this morning and out to the garden.  I first started to pull violets out of my hosta bed and spread the load of mulch that Norman brought up for me.  I worked until my back told me it was a lost cause and I quit.  

These are the violets just outside the hosta bed and as long as they stay there I like them but each flower turns into hundreds of seeds and they all blow into my garden.  Because the whole land is so steep it is hard to grow grass on this land.

This is just beside the hosta bed and you can see there isn’t much grass here and if I pull the violets there would be nothing holding the hill in the rain.  We do reseed each year but I decided to let the violets grow wherever they want to and stop the fight.  Then I side dressed the aspagrus bed, we had our first meal of aspagrus yesterday and will get another meal in a day or two.  Then fed the raspberries and started on the blueberries when Norman called me in for breakfast, he was back from his walk.  After breakfast we went to McMinnville and got 9 broccoli, 9 cauliflower, 9 cabbage, 3 different pepper plants, Texas sweet onion set and sweet red onion sets, a rosemary plant and 3 sweet basil plants.  Tomorrow we will plant these in the lower garden.  As we came home I got to see our apple trees from the back side as we drove down the drive way, and what a beautiful sight.

You can see that both apple trees have blossoms, both the winesap and the golden delicious so there should be a nice apple crop with good cross pollination.   That reminded me I never showed you the dogwood trees.  We lost many of them this spring when that awful ice storm hit. 

This shows two of the trees that made it.  Each year there are fewer and fewer dog wood trees but the ones that do make it are so pretty.  

These are the grape, they are starting to open.  Each little bud opens and gets a bunch of grapes and a longer branch with another cluster of grapes so as of now it looks like a good crop.  You can see we keep the ground under the grapes very clean so the black blight does not get them again this year. 

In the rock garden things are beginning to grow.  You saw the hellebores last time, this time  here  is one English Primrose. I moved most of them las year out into the grove, this is one I missed.  They are a vey pretty little flower but they can’t stand up to the vica major or the black eyed susans so I moved them.  Note the hosta in the back ground.  I moved two hosta plants into this bed three years ago and now I have 5 or 6 in here , they just seed over from the hosta bed further down the hill.  

These are the ones I transplanted.  The lilie of the valley are up also now and at the lower end of the bed is the bleeding heart.

Getting bigger every day.

This is the snowball bush and it is budded well also.  

This is the Chinese bittersweet I transplanted last year.  I tried growing one of these in  Blairsville and after 7 years all I ever got was a two foot vine.  Here I put it up next to the porch with an arbor and that one grew up the arbor and tried to grow up the side of the house to the upper porch.  Norman kept cutting it back as he says all it is is a supper high way for the ants to our kitchen.  Now I keep it cut way back there and hope this year to dig it up and put it some place where it can grow all it like.  It has red and yellow berries on in the fall and makes a wonderful fall bouquet,,

This is the kitchen garden, the spinach is growing well as is the turnips ,onions and lettuce.  the beets are just up on the right hand side of the garden.  Now I need to side dress these.  

The hickory grove is pretty well cleaned up now and is a nice walk down to the big garden.  I do love the spring, everything changes from day to day as new flowers bloom and everything turns green.  The iris are budding and the purple scented ones will be blooming soon.  Have a great day.