More blooms, more spring catch-up

Some blooms that didn't arrive for GBBD:

Viburnum 'Mohawk' in full flower now, smelling like cloves gone to heaven.  It blooms for about a week, and I go outside every night to smell it.  At the other end of the front porch, the Pieris japonica keeps going for about a month, pumping out the honey scent, and I love it too, but the viburnum, like everything we have only a short while, steals my heart.

When I said that one little tulip was the last of the 'Surprise' era, and none of the others were going to bloom this year?  I lied.  I think they'll be there forever.

I just liked this magnolia with magnolia snow under it.  It's been a little hot (and drizzly) for some of the spring flowers this week, but it'll get cold again tonight.

Speaking of which (seedlings in photo, hardening off outside for reasons explained here, but will have to come in again tonight) I have been terrible about keeping track of seed-starting, but um, obviously I started some tomatoes (and other things) back in mid-March, and they are doing well despite [see link above].  Over the past weekend I put in seeds for squash, cucumbers, peanuts, Malabar spinach, maybe something else... the cukes are coming up.  Need to start melons and sunflowers.

In other news for which I neglected to get a photo, we've had a pair of what we're pretty sure are vultures hanging out on occasion in our enormous black walnut tree (they are high up, and I haven't looked through binoculars yet).  I sort of hope they come back, although on the other hand they are creepy and I am telling the cat not to take a nap in the yard.

Tomorrow I am teaching Intensive Vegetable Gardening at Montgomery College, and am rushing about printing things and doing a last-minute run to the Rockville library to check out Square Foot Gardening which, why do I not have a copy of it, I don't know.  So this is all for now.

Bloom Day April

I'm not doing a great job keeping up with recording things here, but I had to chime in for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, because so much is in bloom so suddenly; it's been quite a week for awakenings, as the cold not-quite-spring gave way to the hot not-quite-summer.  None of these flowers will last as long as they did last spring, which went on for months, so it's as well we celebrate them now.

Here's a quick tour of some of what I've got, unlabeled because I don't want to take the time figuring out for sure which daffodil is which.

The tulip at the end is apparently the last surviving of the supposedly-not-perennial 'Surprise' which has been surprising me for at least ten years now in eight inches of clay by the mailbox, timing itself perfectly to clash violently with the above purple-pink magnolia.  I can't help admiring them as I chant "die, already" each spring.

I didn't walk back to photograph the daffodils on the far back slope, but I'm glad to see they are growing and blooming.  I pretty much had to ignore that project last year, and I know I've got to go down and cut back multiflora rose and Japanese honeysuckle, but at least some of what I put in has survived, and I've just added a few nandina plants that my neighbor wanted to get rid of because they had too much of a suckering habit for her purposes.  In my situation, the more suckering the better.

Hope everyone's enjoying their spring blooms!