Hooray for the Rain!

It's been raining pretty much non-stop for the better part of 48 hours now - not a big gully washer, just a lovely keeping-on-raining rain. This might not sound so fabulous to those of you who didn't try to irrigate berries and flowers and vegetables last summer using a hose and an electric pump in the pond - but to those of us who did, it's AMAZING! Because I got some early flowers in the ground this week to go with the larkspur (Bachelor's Buttons, Bells of Ireland, old fashioned sweet-smelling Sweet Pea, and a couple of things who are escaping me right now), and this rain ought to give them exactly what they need to germinate. Yay rain!

The seedlings in the sunroom are looking rather happy also - I've got heirloom tomatoes (Cherokee Purple, German Pink, German Striped, Brandywine, and Sun Gold), peppers (red bells, yellow bells, piminetos and Hungarian wax peppers), herbs (sweet basil, lime basil, purple basil, cilantro, catnip etc.), broccoli, swiss chard, snapdragons, stocks, eucalyptus, lisianthus, bee balm, perennial sunflowers, celosia, bachelor's buttons, and a few other things that are floating around. So it's starting to look like we're really growing things - and that's pretty exciting for this time of year.

We had our first vendor meeting for City Market for this year and it was fun to see our friends, and exciting to hear all of the new plans. The market's full - more vendors that spaces (and wow am I glad we went ahead and joined the market last year, even though it was our first year and I wasn't sure it was worth it for first year - um, yeah!). All sorts of cool plans are going on for including more craft vendors, more kids activities, accepting EBT (food stamps, more or less, which is a great idea for making the market more inclusive), and generally helping the market thrive and evolve. We're excited to be a part of it.