You have received the last few issues of “Dallying” on Mondays and I’m now trying to get back to Fridays. Most of you will do your gardening on the weekend and would find information about gardening activities more useful beforehand. Probably Saturday morning this week and Friday next week. Had busy and interesting gardening week. Spent a few hours at an insurance company on Thursday doing a “lunch and learn” session with the staff. We looked at a variety of herbs for the garden and some of my recipes that utilize the herbs that I grow. I then demonstrated planting a “strawberry pot” with a variety of herbs and one of the attendees was lucky enough to take it home. One of the interesting things about most of these “lunch and learn” sessions is that I generally get to do the same thing twice to cover two lunch times for the staff. I get to immediately change anything that didn’t work or to incorporate the answers to the most common first session questions but I also have to repeat myself and remain as fresh and enthusiastic the second time around. Fortunately, when I’m talking about gardening to an eager audience, that’s not difficult at all. It’s hard to decide whether actually spending time in the garden is more fun than talking about it. Of course, if I didn’t do a lot of the former then I couldn’t do the latter.




It’s amazing just how rapidly the huge quantity of snow covering my gardens can disappear. A few warm sunny days and it’s mostly all gone and mid week there were a couple of Crocus in bloom. These are the little Crocus tomasinianus that are widely used in my garden because they are early and, more importantly, the squirrels don’t like them. The area just off the patio, under the Walnut tree has many of these Crocus that pop up there, before the Hosta start to emerge. So far two of them have made it. We will wait patiently?? for the others. I have rummaged through my bulb storage box looking for things that seemed to have made it through the winter. Several large Colocasia seem to be in good shape and they have been potted up. They are big corms, (one of the large storage organs we tend to lump together, incorrectly, as bulbs,) and needed 12 -15 cm pot (5" -6") to hold them. I had at least 6 of them. They do multiply during the summer and, of course, I wouldn’t think about discarding any that might be surplus to my needs. No room under the lights so they went straight out to the cold frame. They’ll probably get more heat and light out there anyway. It was 92̊ F when I opened it on a sunny day earlier this week. The Dahlia tubers are looking a little suspect and I have put them in a warmer spot to see if they show any signs of life before I pot them up. I may have to go and acquire some new and different varieties.