Yay, green!

Yesterday marked the first day of 2009 that I worked in my garden. Huzzah! The snow has mostly melted except along the fences, where there is still about a foot of a strangely pebbly and granular snow/ice in some areas.

As a result of the melt elsewhere in the yard, I was finally able to cut down dead raspberry canes along the side of the house from the last two years. I was too afraid to get rid of all my raspberries the first year, and last year I couldn't remember which ones had already borne fruit, so I let them all be. I also cut down thin, weedy-looking canes to make way for stronger ones in future. A trip to Home Depot is in order in the coming weeks to purchase tall stakes. This year will be a more organized crop, I hope.

There appears to be strange webby-looking mold on certain areas of the grass, namely the walkway from the patio, probably due in part to the natural dip in the landscape keeping the ground wet. But it's also near the base of the pink rosebush. I'll keep an eye on it in the event it begins to change color or smell like trolls or something, but it's probably just spring's talent for decomposition at work.

But the best part of yesterday was seeing the bits of green beginning to emerge. The grass is still a bleached yellow mat that crackles when you walk on the areas dried by the sun, but along the house, beneath the powder room window, are sprouts which will eventually become tiger lilies. Further along, coneflower buds can be seen. Amongst the canes is the oddly bright lipped mouth of hyacinth. And to my delight, my experiment with dividing rotted tulip bulbs until I found a few good nuggets seems to be bearing leaf.

Two years ago, I had purchased several bags of tulip bulbs, which I was unable to plant before the first frost. This past October, I spent several hours on my back step, enjoying the heat of the Indian summer sun beating on my skin, carefully taking apart the tulip bulbs that had rotted in the bag in the hopes that some would still have viable cores. Tulip mold is a fine black powder that has an amazing softness, like fine ash, and would fly away if pressed too hard; I took care not to bring the bulbs too close to my face so that I wouldn't inhale it. Like garlic, tulip bulbs have cloves, but not always in the structured way that garlic has: tulip "cloves" can grow around each other, and it was usually these outer layers that had rotted, leaving strangely formed innards I broke apart for maximum flower spread.

In the end, I had, I believe, over 30 pieces that might grow into flowers, not including the new narcissus bulbs I had bought. If it works, it will be a one-time only, blowy display of pink, orange, purple, and yellow. If not, well, at least I'll have a new narcissuses (narcissi?) to cover an area once taken over by a dead blackberry bramble.

I love spring!!!