Now it’s feeling like spring! 60s weather and sunny for a couple days anyway.  I feel like it has been endless digging in that front bed to get it cleared of roots and ground cover, and I guess it has been endless. I’m a little worried that some of these might be tree roots as well as ivy, bushes and groundcover, so I am not going to go gung ho and rip all that out, mostly the surface stuff.  I would hate to cause problems with the trees, seeing as they are our neighbor’s and not ours.

We were at Lowe’s last night and I couldn’t resist looking at the discount rack for plants. Wouldn’t you know there were $5 clematis vines?  I have no idea why because they look fine. Just need a little water:

I think what they do is that when the “buy me” blooms fall off, they move the plant to discount. Even though people in the garden world know that clematis don’t bloom yet here, I guess if you don’t see blooms you don’t buy it? Whatever, I’ll take a $5 vine to help cover the chain link fence on the one side of our yard (which is ours).

I went back there to dig a hole for it and wouldn’t you know, more of those slate rocks are buried right along the fence. So I dug up another big pile — go muscles!

That bucket was for me to cart dirt that we dug out of the front bed for the path to replace the space the stones left. Functional fitness!  I think we can about build another Stonhenge with all the rocks I’ve dug up so far. I then planted the new clematis and moved over the sweet autumn clematis that was supposed to grow on our old fence.

I had a frustrating bit with squirrel damage. There were new tulips just about open and a squirrel came and ate all the buds.

Grrrr!  So, I got some animal repellant (at said Lowe’s visit last night).

This stuff I guess is kind of like the bitter apple to keep dogs from licking. It’s safe for humans and pets, it just doesn’t taste good. It stinks, though. It smells sort of like a cross between liquid smoke, garlic and maybe bacon? LOL. Yuck. Hopefully this will save the other tulips.

They only seem to bother stuff out in the back and never the front of the house. Not sure why. Anyway, bloom time!

Forget me nots, which are in the lawn.

All of the claudias are open now. They are so pretty!

The triumph tulips are open now:

This is called Escape and what a red color it is in the sun!

Even in the evening it has a nice glow to it.

Front shot:

Still more tulips to come, the black and white ones, plus a couple others.  The majority of the plants made it through the winter. Just a couple casualties, but I will wait a bit and see if they are just really slow to wake up.

Saturday will be good riding weather and we are planning on a 40-mile ride for the first time this year. That means cupcakes!! 😀