A mild spring-like day

It was lovely today, relatively clear skies with a high close to 70°F.  Spring-like weather.

It's too early to carefully clean up leaves in my perennial (pocket meadow/pollinator border) beds, as I don't want to trample on the sodden soil quite yet.

red-veined sorrel coming back, with a newly planted kale plant behind

But my raised beds -- where I grow vegetables and herbs, well, hey they're available for some quick planting.  Filled with compost-rich soil, they're well-drained and ready to turn.

I'm pushing the envelope just a bit, but one of our local nurseries, Jesse Israel, has beautiful cool season transplants now:  kale, collards, spinach, chard, cabbage, broccoli, etc.

greens and a new platform bird feeder, to replace the one that finally broke.

I snagged five 4-packs of spinach, chard, kale and collards.  They'll produce some greens for us over the 6 weeks or so that we're here, and then hopefully our HomeExchange folks from Ireland will enjoy them, too.  Then, I'll switch the beds to herbs before we leave for the summer.

This wasn't mindful, designed planting!

I basically just added some organic sustained release fertilizer to spots cleaned of overwintered leaves, turned the basically rich compost/soil mix in the beds over, and put the young transplants in.

We'll see.

Most of my perennial herbs were hammered by winter.  I've cut back dead stems on marjoram and oregano, removed all of the dead thyme, and am waiting to see if I can make the rosemary look half-way decent.  It's looking winter-burned, but perhaps my two plants will "respond to pruning" when it's time in a couple of weeks.  They were "replacements" last spring.  Again.  That's OK.

I have perennial leeks to lift and divide sooner rather than later.  I should have done it last fall.

When they're crowded, they don't do much except produce offshoots.  I harvested two large ones that weren't crowded today.  They were delicious with dinner.