May Flowers

Alternate blog title - 'Now I Will Ramble About Plants, After Some Stitching Progress'

So April is over and May is here - I had lots of fun with the A-Z challenge and wanted to say 'Welcome!' to my new followers!  I'm slowly working my way through all the blog posts I missed - April was crazy with work and all.

My stitching goals bombed, too, but I did get another motif on Mary done.  It was a rich burgundy-brown shade this time around.  I hadn't used this color in the pattern yet.



And I promised a picture of the whole project - here is how she looks!  I think there is another motif and then a really small one and I will have reached the bottom on the left hand side.



The colors are still washed out - I have yet to manage a good picture of the colors.  Those two nearly-invisible motifs show up perfectly well in real-life.

After the luck I had with Patty, I was telling a co-worker that I thought I might get a few more plants, maybe, and she took that as a hint that I wanted cuttings of the ones on her desk, because I had told her before that I knew how to do that - sometimes.  It works with some plants, others it doesn't.  But she immediately handed me some scissors.  It actually works better to break them, or so I've found, so that's what I did.  I really wasn't hinting, by the way, because starting plants from cuttings can be annoying.  But I took what I thought might work, and wrapped them in wet paper towels and took them home.

There were four - a plain green leaf, a cactus-y plant, a pretty little heart-shaped plant, and one of those pink vines.  The cactus and the heart-shaped one I was able to get a bit of root, so I started those in soil.  The other two were in water, with paper towels to hold the leaves above it, so they wouldn't rot.






This was two or three weeks ago, and today I noticed that the little pink plant was putting out a tiny bit of new shoot - very good sign!  So I checked, and yes - there was quite a bit of root under that paper towel!  So into some dirt she went:



See her little, tiny new growth? And her other leaves are bigger.  The plant beside her is doing so well that she's got a name (Agnes) and is about to put into a real pot.  The little pink one will get a name if she continues to grow.

The other two - I don't know.  The first one is getting very pale, and I checked and there is no root growth.  I'm not throwing her out yet, but I don't think she's going to 'take'.  I'm not sure about the cactus.  He wilted rather badly for a while, but now he has plumped back up again.  He still doesn't look all that healthy, and there is no new growth, but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.  This pic shows the whole little shelf under my kitchen window, where they are sitting, along with some strawberry plants.



The point of all this rambling, is that taking care of these wee ones has started my gardening itch up big time.  So when our little mom-and-pop grocery store got their spring plants in, I bought... um, a few too many.  Here's what most of my kitchen is covered in (makes it hard to do dishes.  I hate doing dishes.  Wonder if there's a connection?)



This is about half of what I got.  There are a lot of veggies and some flowers.  I'm nursing them along until May 10th - that's the almanac date for going outside!  These will mostly be in containers this year, because I didn't get a garden spot plowed up.  Next year will be different!  The flowers will be going in the 'real' dirt, though!

One last picture - last year my snowball bush was, um, it looked really mangy.  This year I went out when the blossoms first started and cut off a good half, at least of the parts I could reach.  My snowball is much taller than me!  Now the blossoms are already the size they were last year when they turned white - so I hope they will grow much bigger!  That big one isn't turning, it's just flash-burned.



This is the only kind of snow left around here!  Knock on wood - but I've never once seen it snow after the last week of April.  My Dad says it has, but I don't remember it.  Is it Spring where you guys are?