Pass the tissues, please.

It’s Friday, and it’s my turn. This past weekend, my youngest son came down with a sore throat and low-grade fever. As the week progressed, it moved on to his older brother and yesterday to me. I thought for sure I was going to dodge this one. 

Ah, well, we did all right as far as staying pretty healthy this winter as a family. 

So, I’m curled up on the couch with plenty of tea and a stack of magazines and catalogs. Top of the pile is the Breck’s catalog. As a kid, while most young girls were leafing through magazines about makeup and teen boy bands, I was planning imaginary gardens filled with flowers.

Now, as an adult, I’m limited only by my hardiness zone and how much space I have left in my flower beds. And after spending last summer planting summer-blooming perennials, I’ve been thinking about all the spring ephemerals I could plant.

If you aren’t familiar with these breathtaking plants, they pop up very early in the spring, giving you beautiful color in the dreariest part of the calendar. Then they disappear just as the summer bloomers get started. As the view from the couch is currently gray and brown, I thought I would put together a list of super early-blooming perennials to plant.

And Mickey is here to save us all from ourselves and some of the most common mistakes we make when planting flowers in pots. I have done #4, a mistake I only made once, but it took forever to change my ways concerning #5.

I’ll see you all on Sunday, hopefully, with fewer tissues involved.