Yesterday was one of those days when I felt like I was in an ‘I Love Lucy” episode, maybe the one at the candy factory. The day began with Reina getting unexpectedly tangled in the electrical cords under all our desks in a manner that abruptly pulled all the wires free from their jacks and outlets. We have so many things I do not understand going on under the desks- things like ethernet connections, rollover phone hook ups, something called GreenHopeOffice that networks the computers to name but a few- and poor Reina had unhinged them all.

Nothing worked. And not surprisingly, crawling around on our hands and knees under the desks looking at all the wires we didn’t understand made no difference. No did hand wringing.

We were sans phone, sans internet, sans network, sans sanity.

To add to the melange of techno meltdowns, the UPS computer that lives across the room in its own PC realm was once more on the fritz. It had imploded for the second time in a month and all our UPS systems were down again.

By the time we jury rigged our phone system into some semblance of operation and got onto email and our computer network ( thanks of course to Ben who took time between teaching his history classes to come up and help save us), we had a day of catch up ahead with a freaky amount of Next Day Air orders and no back up plan for how to launch them.

I would have gone to ground in the gardens, pleading pressing weeds in the Venus Garden, but it was about as hot as it gets in New Hampshire. Thinking about pulling a weed was enough to break us all into a sweat, well all of us except, of course, Lynn.

Whenever we have one of these mid-Atlantic type heat waves, we watch in awe as Lynn remains cool and crisp in her Bermudian summer wardrobe. One would not think that believing that “horses sweat, men perspire, but a woman only glows” would make ANY difference, but with Lynn the belief has morphed into fact. When we broke from the chaos in the office to take the dogs for a lunchtime walk, Lynn remained fresh as a daisy while the rest of us grew progressively more bedraggled as we force marched the dogs and ourselves from watering hole to watering hole.

But just like an ‘I Love Lucy’ episode, the good thing about melodramatic technology implosions is that they only last just so long. This one did last more than the thirty minutes of a TV episode, but we did salvage the day. As we closed up shop for the night, all the orders had been launched, thanks to former staffer Liz Taylor who sent off our UPS packages from her family’s smokehouse. We even managed to get the order off to the woman who had to spell her name for me eight times because, well, when the wires got unplugged under the desks, this seemed to have affected my brain as well.

As the day cooled and evening arrived, we went out into the garden to savor the first Rose blossoms and watch the amazing array of birds in the garden this spring. As the sun set, the light flashed off the pair of baltimore orioles and a papa bluebird, and we could hear two male cardinal birds singing. Not a bad way to finish the day.

And now a good night’s sleep leaves me ready for today’s episode. First things first, I need to go visit with the Agnes Rose justing starting to bloom, then its off to the races!

Given the slug population explosion these last few years, this season in the vegetable, Red Shiso and Venus gardens we are forgoing our usual deep hay mulch to see if a scorched earth scenario breaks the slug cycle. After twenty years of keeping everything covered with a deep layer of mulch hay, I find myself very uncomfortable with all this exposed earth. I certainly hope it is making the slugs MORE uncomfortable.

Here is Elizabeth building the center piece of this year’s main vegetable- a tent of Scarlet Runner Beans. Note abundant exposed soil and tiny weeds demonstrating that without mulch, it is going to be a long summer of weeding.

In the Flowerbeds, the Tree Peonies are either about to open or just opening-

Emily is back from a wonderful adventure in Sicily and we are all so happy she is

ready to take on all the bindweed in the perennial beds which are looking very lush right now.

The beautiful new cold frames built by Jim during his April “vacation” are chock a block full of baby plants, hardening off until the end of the month when they can be planted out. The greenhouse also is teeming with baby plants and a lot of grumpy tropical plants who impatiently await their summer season outside after a long winter inside.

It is SPRING and our cup runneth over! I hope you too are wallowing in new life!

In between snow flurries, the gardens go about their business.

As do the bumblebees.

I wish I could convey here in this blog the haunting clove fragrance of the Black Currant blossoms. They make every trip past the berry patch a pleasure.

I am only glad that so many of you can catch the perfume of Lilac on the wind right now. Dear Lilac, such a generous easy friend!

Last week gave me ample opportunities to keen like my Irish ancestors when every plant in the garden got blasted by MORE snow and arctic chill.

Even the Pansies found this a bit much. First looking like this

then looking like this.

For a number of years, I have been cajoling a Pink Flower Almond Tree into settling into our orchard. A Green Hope friend from Barcelona had given me a tiny bottle of its stunning Flower Essence and I have worked for several years to grow this tree and convince it to bloom even though this is not even close to a climate it prefers. This year it was radiant with blossoms and fortunately I made an Essence before the snows, because this tree that looked so magnificent before the snows looked rather irked at me after them.

I hope the Pink Flowering Almond will give us a second chance with our climate. At least I can promise that it is unlikely the same thing will happen this time next year (something else equally strange will).

This weekend also worked in my favor with the Almond Tree. Its in the nineties today. Yes, in this era of confused climate, I should have expected the five inches of snow to be followed by full on summer heat, but some part of me still finds it bizarre to bundle in woolens one day then find it too hot to be out in the gardens the next.
I did have enough energy to go out and cut a handful of tulips before they got all blowzy in the heat, and I couldn’t help but notice how fresh and beautiful they looked upside down as I walked them into the house. Everything is unexpected these days, but often so very beautiful.