It’s spring again and that means another year of trying to score an heirloom sungold tomato plant from Craig and Susan LeHoullier. We got started too late last Saturday and by the time we arrived at 11am, they were sold out. Since I didn’t feel like driving out to their house in North Raleigh during the week, I was determined to arrive early enough this morning.

Now, I get up every morning around 7am to take the dog out and give her breakfast. Then she crawls back into bed with me and snoozes for a few hours while I work on my laptop. This morning, however, we left right after breakfast.

This is how she looked on the way to Raleigh…

I think pup was missing her morning nap.

We pulled in at 8am sharp and I am happy to report that I am now the proud owner of a tiny sungold tomato plant. It joins the Tiger Tom heirloom variety that we purchased last week.

They may be little now, but look what happened last year. :)

(Did I really say that I would only buy one tomato plant this year? Whoops!)

In other garden-related news, we will not have to buy any herbs this year, as illustrated by this photo that Eric took this morning.

This is what the deck box looked like just a year ago.

The recent rainfall along with the warm temperature has brought most everything in our garden to life over the last few weeks, and we are fully in mid-spring in Durham. Some photos from the garden:

Our daffodils started blooming in mid-February, and this is one of the last with a bloom. I’ll need to deadhead them next weekend.

A group of grape hyacinths in the front yard. This is the most prolific they’ve ever been, which is surprising considering the drought we’ve had.

These hyacinths have a great scent so we’ve been cutting some to bring inside.

With a little luck our dogwoods will be in bloom next week!

Even with the drought we still have a few plants that have provided us some color late into November. For example, we planted hardy cyclamen several years ago, and they send up flowers every fall.

These are really winter plants- after they’re done flowering they’ll send out their leaves which will stick around until April or so. We’ve also got some traditional fall color, especially from my Japanese maple:

Clearly happy in its container on the patio.

The biggest surprise is our gerbera daisy:

We haven’t had a gerbera flower in several months, but after we got some rain a few weeks ago, “Fred” came back to life and started blooming. With a bit of mulch the gerberas will come back next year. Hopefully we’ll have a better balance of sun and rain in the next growing season for Fred and all the others!