Baby Leaves and Random Bits

Baby leaves are growing on all sorts of plants: bushes, trees, and ground plants in the forest. I love watching the plant changes that take place in spring. Budding leaves are particularly fascinating, I think. The weather has turned comfortable this week, and yesterday in between teaching students I moved my containers with garden herbs like rosemary and lavender back outside. They are happy to be in the sunshine for hours at a time again. They always look pretty rough by the end of the winter, particularly the lavender but somehow they straggle through and fill out again in the spring. Whenever I buy new lavender plants, they don’t bloom very much the first season, but in subsequent summers after miserably wintering inside, they are usually full of fragrant blossoms even though they look ridiculously unkempt

In other nature news, we have been entertained by a chickadee couple who moved into one of our birdhouses in the backyard. We are hoping the wrens will next in a house again this year as well. It’s a lot of fun to sit on the deck and watch the chickadees flit in and out of their residence. My study buddy has been enjoying identifying different birds that have made their way back to our neighborhood this spring.

For Mother’s Day I was gifted not one but two awesome poems from two different children. Can there be a better gift than a poem? I think not!!! I really enjoyed both poems so much. YaYa also called from college, where she is spending the summer. It was a treat to talk to her.

The Banana stashed away three bananas to secretly ripen so that we could make banana chocolate chip muffins. They were consumed quickly and tasted delicious. We haven’t had them for so very long because there are never ripe bananas around here.