on to more pleasant topics...

My tomatoes are growing lushly, the plants are almost as tall as the cages already with tomatoes growing and blooming profusely. The foliage is so dense and thick that the flowers weren't getting fertilized so I sprayed some bloom set on them and then last week I got in there with scissors and cut away some of the foliage and started picking off all the suckers that didn't already have open flowers on them. Tomatoes may be the only thing I get our of this spring garden. 

The potatoes are also growing lushly and are blooming but since I ran out of dirt to keep piling up around the plants early on I don't know how many potatoes I'm going to get. I don't even know when I'm supposed to harvest them. When the plants die down I guess. Now that they are blooming, it is too late to pile up more dirt?

The one clump of zucchini in the big bed is growing well but the one in the new raised bed, the one with the so-called magic caney soil? Hasn't grown, has turned yellow. And the onions haven't grown one bit. So, even with the 1/3 of the good expensive dirt mixed in, that caney soil is worthless. I'm going to have to spend this season building up the soil with organic material and then maybe it will grow something in the fall garden. The neighbor says it has to be topsoil which this wasn't but my sister got some caney topsoil once and it was full of nut grass and other weeds.

Stuff is blooming in the yard y'all...roses, poppies, mock dogwood, cosmos, rocket larkspur, evening primrose, baby blue eyes, volunteer zinnias, verbena, amaryllis, mexican petunias, love-in-a-mist, purple coneflowers, nun's orchid, and the day lilies are starting to send up scapes.

This maroon japanese iris has bloomed for the first time. I acquired the small clump of rhizomes three or four years ago and finally they are blooming.

But other things did not like the daffodils and the purple iris and the white iris, lots of foliage but no blooms. The little climbing jasmine that froze to the ground has come back but will not bloom this year and of all the things that froze last winter, all but three came back...the shrub with the little coral flowers, a small mexican bush sage, and the white orchid tree in a pot. I decided to go ahead and pull the dead carcass of the white orchid tree out of the pot today, reached down and yanked it one way and heard one of the roots snap and then looked down to see a cluster of small growth at the base of the small truck. DOH!!! 

So I cut off the dead part and watered it well and crossing my fingers that it still has several more good sized roots.