Happy Spring Equinox! Here’s our female kiwi leafing out on this blustery day.
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A perfect fall day to get some work done.
Exciting Spring growth. Three of our native Beargrass (Xerophyllum tenax) are flowering in the front yard (and setting seed!). They only flower after 5-7 years and then die. I also hadn’t realized that kiwi plants were carnivorous until ours started eating the bird feeder.
May garden tour
The evidence of Spring — the daffodils are flowering, the kiwi is leafing out (!!), and the shallots and garlic are poking up after overwintering.
On May first we went to the Spring Seattle Tilth sale and bought the starts we hadn’t grown ourselves — Little Finger eggplant, sweet peppers (Beaver Dam and Hungarian), hot peppers (Thai, king of the north, long cayenne), crookneck squash and New England pie pumpkins, a couple tomatoes (Red Fig and Sungold), summer and winter savory, sweet corn, chinook and cascade hops, moroccan mint, red shiso, cipollini onions, and a male and female kiwi plant from one of the nursery stands.
A week later we went to the WNPS spring native plant sale for the first time. Our big score was a flat of 4″ pots of Deer ferns. Usually ferns are in gallon pots, which makes them pretty expensive, so this was a great deal –18 ferns for $4 each. We also scored aVaccinium membranaceum, the native blueberry (technically, “Black Huckleberry”) I brought from the Capitol Hill house and is hard to find. The guy next to me took the second-to-last one, so I could only get one of the five I needed.
I planted the natives from the sale in the front and back, along with 32 Lupinus albicaulisthat I had started from seed last fall.
