Spring Fever

Building upon my experiences from last year's foray into container gardening, I spent Sunday's sunny afternoon planting seeds. My DH was a wonderful help as I was trying to wield the Costco sized bag of potting soil.

These plants will stay inside until they appear hearty enough to go outside. Lessons learned from last year - I started them all in their own containers to avoid any transplanting related stress and these containers are even bigger than last year's containers so each plant has enough soil.



I planted rosemary, thyme, basil, lavender, and parsley in the large pots. There are two pots of basil as I'm hoping to make a lot of pesto this summer as well as try to train/prune one of them into a basil tree. The little blue pots have basil and the little green pots have rosemary. I'm hoping these will be great gifts to give should the seeds succeed. My rosemary last year didn't make it past the seedling phase.

The container already outside will stay there. I added some Johnny-Jump Up seeds as well as some extra lavender and parsley seeds. It is going to be more of a survival of the fittest in that container. Who knows which plants will grow and win in the end. The lambs ear is clearly in the lead. I'm hoping the flowers and the parsley will attract some butterflies this year like they did last year.



Did I ever even post about the butterflies last year? A search of the blog says no. Oops. Well, here's the story - during Labor Day weekend, a beautiful blue butterfly was intrigued with my parsley plant. Turns out, she was laying eggs! I found this out when I saw the leaves of my parsley plant disappearing and these little guys were there. Turns out black swallowtail butterflies love to lay their eggs on plants of the parsley family.



But back to this year's garden... The little garden Goddess stake decoration I found at Joann Fabrics. I also found a wall hanging and a whirligig thingamabob. I wanted wind chimes but I figured the dog would go berserk every time they chimed in the wind.



The two planters on the railing need new liners before they can be filled with soil. The rest of the Johnny-Jump Up seeds will be planted in them and perhaps, if I find something fun, some other type of flower or vine will be planted there, too.

In the meantime, the waiting and the watering continues until little green sprouts appear.