Seeds and spring ~

Spring has definitely arrived in Southern California!

With so much going on it was hard to find one picture I wanted to share with you, I decided to post nasturtiums because in my garden they are so emblematic of early spring. For the next few weeks they will romp gloriously through the borders, wane, and then be ready to be pulled out to make way for other plantings, faithfully returning next year.

Meanwhile...

I have been planting lots of annual seeds, hoping to get a head start on flowers for summer color.I usually wait too long, this year I think I have started early enough to have plants ready to put out in the garden by June.

 Up to now I have been using little peat pots to start the seeds, but decided that these would be more efficient to use for any seedlings that needed pricking out and potting up before planting in the garden, or for starting larger seeds, such as sunflowers.

So this morning I made a trip to Home Depot and bought a commercial Pro-Hex starting tray to use for planting the rest of the seeds. It is all a fun experiment to see which way is the best and it will probably work out to be some combination of the two.

So far, in the peat pot tray I planted earlier, the strawflowers and gomphrenas seeds have began to sprout. I am growing them for both garden color and to use in dried bouquets.

No spring flowers in the picture above - the contrast of the succulents growing in this fountain against the wall covered in creeping ficus caught my eye this morning, I though it was so pretty I had to take a picture. 

Thank you for visiting

Happy Spring! 

Adrienne