Sun-day

We were finishing breakfast yesterday when the sun came out! Brilliant warm light! We basked for about 30 seconds, and then wonderful Kevin hopped up and headed out into the 42-degree sunshine to clean all of our windows.



It makes such a huge difference. He followed it up with weedwhacking the suddenly 10" tall mess on the top shelf of the yard, blowing all of the sodden, caked-on sawdust off of the patio, and redistributing all of the mulch from when we had the tree stumps ground into the beds along the side of the house.



It looks awesome. He’s a good person. :-) Then he headed out with the macro lens to get photos of the dew on the flowers. (As usual, click for big. The detail he gets with the macro lens is beautiful.)

We have lots of buds on the daffodils:



I keep expecting to wake up to find a riot of flowers, but they’ve been keeping tightly curled. We still have just a few partial blooms, and those are all toppled, like the weight of all the rain and the grey made them just want to lie down. Poor despairing flowers.



It appears that something has been snacking on our primroses.



I love the orange-yellow bleed of color on these white primroses.



And the minidaffodils are still looking dainty and bright. I definitely want to plant more of these for next spring.




I went out to admire his handiwork around noon, and discovered that the sun was actually warming things up! It got up to the mid-fifties, and was so pleasant outside in a sweatshirt. We did a quick hardware store run for gardening supplies (weed and moss killers for the lawn -- post on this tomorrow -- plus new grass seed. We got back and spent the entire rest of the afternoon (until twilight, so after 7) moving from one project to the next. Kevin mowed the lawn (the first time this season!) and then sprayed down the entire yard (front and back, including the top shelf and most of the beds) with broadleaf killer. I put primroses and pansies in the planter by the front walk, and then finally planted the entire 90-bulb bag of sprouting tulips. One of these years I'll do that in October, when you're supposed to. I used the handsnips to deadhead and even out a few of the bushes, including the hydrangea by the kitchen window, and then continued on to remove all of the dead plants, branches and runners from the rock wall. I picked up a full yardwaste bin's worth of downed birch and evergreen branches. Whew. Kevin did a round of moss killing on the driveway, and I potted cilantro for the kitchen window. The yard looks amazing from every window. It's going to be a treat to come home and see it all week!!