The Impatient Gardener

It's SPRING!

It's sunny and warmer and there hasn't been a temp below freezing for well over a week, and surely that means I can plant things now, right?  

Well, the gardening guides tell me to wait until all danger of frost has passed, which technically, is this area, is April 15.  Bah.  It's 40 degrees at night!  It's going to be SEVENTY this week in the day time!  I drove by a few nurseries and they were starting to put out stock -- LET ME PLANT THINGS!!!

Sigh.  I went to the nurseries.  What they were putting out was a bunch of annuals intended for flower baskets, some evergreen shrubs, and a few bare root roses.  Not what I want!  What I want is flowering perennials.  So I had to settle for this lone heather (a very hardy, winter-blooming plant):

It made me happy, as I've always wanted to grow heather ever since admiring it on the Grampian hillsides in Scotland.  But I want MORE plants, and I want them NOW, but apparently I have to be patient.  Dang.

So in the meantime, I worked on my garden decor efforts.  Here is a nifty wind spinner I found, with a solar light:

And I expanded the fence decorations with another repurposed coat rack and some metal wall art found at a garage sale.

The other issue with SPRING in this area is the wind.  When it warms up, the winds come calling, often blowing steadily at 15-20mph for days on end.  Here we see Pippin and Truman being blown sideways on a 25mph day:

This kind of puts a damper on any outdoor activities.

We had an awful lot of windy days last week, though I did get out on one less-windy day to go look at the Sandhill Cranes again.  Thus, contrary to last week's statement that there weren't likely to be many bird pics here for a while, here are two more of the cranes:

Whee!

Okay, on to the art.  We are now meeting via Zoom for our art practice sessions THREE times a week.  On Wednesdays and Fridays we choose a photo to work from and do the same one (usually).  On Mondays we work on whatever we want to, and it doesn't necessarily need to be finished in our 90-minute time frame.

This past Monday I chose to do a freehand sketch from a photo of Crowley from Good Omens, to practice my people-drawing skills.  I used a very cheap #2 pencil that was just lying around, on some old paper that I wanted to use up.

On Wednesday we chose a lovely photo of a French castle, which I rendered using ink and watercolor.  I quite like how this turned out.

For Friday's session, due to a technical issue, we wound up each choosing our own photo from a group of landscape pics.  I opted for this derelict boat, done in watercolor (no ink). 

This coming week I am hoping to get out and about more if I don't get blown away.  There are some home improvement projects happening here, and it might be noisy, so getting out a lot will be a good idea.  I shall talk more about those projects next Monday!

Have a great week out there!