Color Cravings

The weather has been absolutely gorgeous in this part of the world for the past week; sunny, breezy, around seventy degrees with a warm sun and clear skies.  I absolutely love this time of year in the bay area, and receiving many envious comments from my relatives back on the east coast who will be waiting a few weeks for Spring to arrive.



I love the play of light through the leaves and tried
to capture it here in my bearded iris, transplanted
from my mother's garden all the way in Pennsylvania

My container garden is growing happily, but I am absolutely impatient for color.  The sweet peas I planted in the fall are growing beautifully and even starting to wrap their tendrils around the strategically placed bits of garden twine for them to climb, the chamomile is going nuts and starting to have little buds.  Feverfew is feverishly getting taller and bushier, and much happier than it was last year since I have moved it to larger planter.  The irises that I transplanted from my mother's garden are sending up more shoots with the promise of flowers in a few weeks.  Even the miniature rose has come back from the grave (I'd seriously given it up as a lost cause and nearly thrown it out when I noticed all the little budding leaves on it).

All the happy growth from regular water and plenty of sunlight.  But gosh darn it, I am downright impatient for some color!  My whole gardening shenanigans started with herbs and so most of my well established plants are of the leafy, green edible type that you cook a chicken with.  Even most of my flowering plants you notice are decidedly well, herby.  I love plants that have uses, I love learning their properties and what ailments they are good for, even if I rarely use them.  But lately I have been eyeing the flowerbeds bursting with wonderfully frivolous color.

And so in my fit of color craving, I went down to the local ACE and perused their plants.  They don't have a large selection in their garden department for small flowering plants, and somehow the pansies were just not doing it for me today, and the deep purple rosebush would be too large for any of my spare planters.  So in I went to the much larger selection of seeds and picked myself out three packs of purely whimsical, flowery goodness for six dollars.  Nasturiums, Cosmos, and California Poppies.  

Admittedly the only one of these choices that was completely devoid of other uses were the Cosmos, but hey some habits die hard.  I'd already done some seed planting earlier this week from my ever growing stash of seed packets.  Some of the packages looked a little dingy from being left out once or twice, but I planted the seeds anyway to see if perhaps they would still come up.  And now my deck table is completely covered in planters of potential.

A Poe in his natural habitat. 
We weren't planning on using that table for anything
 else, were we?  Ok, good, I didn't think so.



My Sage is going nuts with new growth and is one
of the survivors from my first seed planting adventures.

Seeds are so much fun!  I discovered them when I was living in San Francisco and still have the sage and thyme plants I started on my window ledge.  Admittedly, my gardening experience has been mostly trial and error, but my thumb has gradually grown more green and my success rate has gone up greatly.  For example I now know better than to dump an entire packet in all at once to a little tiny planter, and to check before hand for seed depth and spacing.  The magic of the little bits of nothing that you put in the ground and they turn into plants never ceases to amaze me.  A little bit of everyday magic that astounds me every time.

And so, my garden is still looking decidedly green and many of my planters very bare, but the promise is there for color to come.  And knowing that makes me feel better.