Saying “rogue arugula” just makes me smile. That one arugula survived the freeze in a completely different location than the original planting is also amusing. There are no plants where I planted them two years ago. I must say that I don’t like arugula. I think it tastes like rubber smells. But the flowers are pretty.

I was so excited that my thyme seeds were sprouting, until the second set of leaves appeared. All those hundreds (if not thousands) of seedlings are not thyme, they are cedar elm. So many cedar elm. Apparently cedar elm seeds survive a deep freeze just fine, in fact, they may even like it. We will be seeding native grass and clover to replace the grass death, but I need to do something about the carpets of tiny trees where I don’t want scrub brush.

These pictures are not from my yard as we are renovating our front beds and my husband is putting in irrigation. We went to gardens nearby to see the spring flowers and walk the trails.

I bought a bouquet for Valentine’s Day and didn’t even see the lilies tucked into the arrangement because none of the buds were in bloom. One of the long pods fell off when I was putting the stems in a larger vase, so I tucked it into a small glass vase. The whole floral display is nice, but watching a single flower open and bloom may be my favorite. However, once it is in full bloom, the scent is overwhelming and needs to be replaced with a new bud. Ah well.

My Thansgiving cactus bloomed! Which is amazing because I didn’t intentionally do anything. The grow light it is under did stop working for an undetermined amount of time (if we have a power outage of even a microsecond the timer resets and I don’t typically notice for awhile). I have read that to get a christmas cactus to bloom you need to give it less light, less heat, and less water. So maybe this reduced light did the trick. I haven’t changed my watering schedule (if a plant can’t handle my watering schedule, it is not a plant for me, because I won’t remember a different schedule), and we keep the temperature of the house fairly constant during the winter (there is a different summer and winter temp, but within the season, it doesn’t vary much). Any who, it is a nice splash of bright color!