I know I’ve been talking about spring forever, but today was a day that made it feel like we’re skipping straight from early spring to summer. They predicted 85, but I don’t think we quite made it. In a matter of hours it feels like everything has sprung.

The mint in the pot from last year grew literally 6 inches today. The hostas jumped up and said hello. The birds suddenly discovered the new feeders we put out. The broccoli is standing up proud and the lettuce is starting to look like more than a couple of leaves.

After work we met friends at the Conway Tavern about 15 miles north of here. It’s one of my favorite bars. The kind that welcomes kids, yuppies and Harley riders alike. They’ve got some of the best burgers around and the beer is always cold. We sat on the patio in the warmth of early evening with spring flowers blooming all around.

We drove home on country roads at sunset. And all the fields that were bare and cold just a few short weeks ago have now been turned and prepped for planting. The dairy cows have been allowed back out onto pasture. And the lambs are no longer so freshly cute, already starting to look more like sheep than babies.

I’ve been waiting and waiting to plant the tomatoes and today they spent a second day on the front porch. Tomorrow afternoon into the ground they go and I expect that they’ll start to shoot up in a matter of days. Although I’m burying them pretty deep to promote root growth so perhaps it won’t be so obvious.

Summer is so close now that I can taste it and I can’t wait!

This fabulous coat belonged to my great aunt Ruth. She was an interesting woman, what I remember most about her is her heavily rouged cheeks, little pillbox hats and her boyfriend. I think his name was Bill? Anyway, at family gatherings he used to always give me a dollar and tell me not to spend it all in one place. Even in high school I remember him giving me a dollar.

With my passion for green, my mom and her sisters decided that this great green coat should be mine. So for my birthday they had it cleaned and had a new collar made for it (it’s fake fur).

I love it! I haven’t been able to wear it anywhere yet, but you can bet that come next fall I’ll be wearing it all the time. The only bummer is that while Ruth was tall for her generation, she had shorter arms than I do. So before fall gets here I need to take it to the local tailor and see if he can add cuffs to match the collar and make the sleeves about 2″ longer.

Isn’t it pretty?

Not really. Today it rained, a nice soaking rain. And though it seems like we’ve been waiting for nice weather forever, it’s okay. It’s okay because the nice weather is coming later this week - it’s supposed to be almost 80 either Thursday or Friday.

Until then though, this mass of greenery on the sofa table is impatiently waiting to go outside for some hardening off and planting.

The tomatoes, basil and peppers are starting to run out of space and it’s time to get them outside.

Some of the tomatoes, those I got from Denise, are so ready that they’re already setting blooms. I know I need to pinch them off, but I haven’t had the heart yet.

What’s impatiently waiting at your house?

I think we all start off with great ambition on every new project. Or at least I do. And then sometimes reality comes along and bites me in the ass. So it was with the great dirt moving project of 2008. When we first started the garden project I was taking my Organic Gardening class through Seattle Tilth and reading all kinds of gardening books.

All of them focus on the “evils” of using a roto tiller or tractor and why you should do it all by hand. But here’s what I’ve figured out - most of them are talking to gardener’s with fairly small or tiny plots. Most of them are not talking to someone that’s got more than 1700 square feet of fresh garden that needs to be tilled and amended and tilled again before you can even start to think about planting.

After a lot of hours of working on turning in the compost and breaking up the last of the half-decomposed sod by hand. And even having my mom help me put in 2 rows while they were visiting, I cried uncle. I decided that if my grandfather, who firmly believed in things like compost and mulch and lots of healthy sun and water could use a roto tiller, than so could I.

Of course I decided that very late on a Saturday and the local rental place was already closed. Sunday Mike and I searched for somewhere to rent one, but the closest place to rent a tiller was the Home Depot in Mt. Vernon. That’s a 50 mile round trip that I would have to make twice. And most likely I would have had to pay for two days of rental at $90 a day since it was already noon and they close their rental counter at 4:00 on Sundays.

What was a girl to do? Why grit her teeth and buy a house warming present of course. Right?!? Actually we worked the numbers and realized that if I rented a tiller for 2 days now and again for 2 days in the fall and then 2 days next year, I would basically have paid for my own tiller. Mike can be quite the enabler when he wants to be.

And I have to say that it was well worth it. We bought the smallest rear tine Troy-Bilt tiller that they make so that I’m able to man-handle it myself. And while roto tilling is itself exhausting, using it for 7 hours last weekend meant that I was able to do most of my spring planting over the past weekend.

So, if you’re a die hard gardener, feel free to throw tomatoes at me. But me, I’m really glad I admitted defeat and got on with my garden. And so are my poor wrists that were starting to get carpal tunnel from moving all that dirt.

Confession time around here. All is not always perfect in paradise. Until this morning, the water here at the (not so) Urban Hennery smelled distinctly like rotten eggs, and had since we moved in. And while it didn’t actually taste bad, the odor was enough to convince you that it did.

It’s something that we knew from the home inspection, while Mike did, since I wasn’t at the inspection I was blissfully unaware until we moved in. Until I turned on the faucet the night we moved in I had no idea that our water smelled like the hot springs at Yellowstone.

The previous owners installed a whole house filtration system that reduces the odor a bit, but doesn’t completely eliminate it. And the filters are fairly short lived due to the volume of sediment (replace every 4 months) and odor (replace every 8 weeks) that the well produces. Depending on what’s causing the smell, the solution is either periodically shocking the well with chlorine, or installing a permanent system that injects either chlorine or performs osmosis or drilling a new well.

Last night we finally got around to shocking the well with chlorine bleach to start to figure out what’s causing it. So far we’ve eliminated the two major causes - the hot water heater and the water softener. We don’t have a water heater since we’ve got a Bosch hot water on demand system. And we by-passed the softener 2 weeks ago to see if that would help. It gave us a short term improvement, but no dice as a permanent solution.

So last night we put a shocking amount of bleach down the well to try to determine our next steps. It’s a crazy thing to do really. You put bleach down your well to try to make it smell better!?! And it takes a bit of time, but once it cycles through the effect is instantaneous. We had to run about 80 gallons of water through the system and back down the wellhead with a hose until the pump kicked in. When it did the change happened almost immediately. The water went from smelling bad to faintly smelling of chlorine. Since it was supposed to smell strongly per the instructions from the Snohomish Health District, we put some more bleach down the well until it smelled strongly.

Then we bled the chlorine through the whole system by opening the faucets, frost free hydrants and flushing the toilets until the water everywhere smelled of chlorine. After that it’s a waiting game. How long can you live without flushing a toilet, washing a dish or brushing your teeth? Luckily we remembered to fill all the pet water bowls, set up the coffee pot and brush our teeth before we chlorinated the system…

This morning we ran about 250 gallons of water through the outdoor faucets to flush the pressure tank and the well, then bled off the remainder through the house fixtures. Finally we replaced the sediment and carbon filters and ran a couple loads of towels in the washer and also the dishwasher to finish the flush.

As of now, the water smells faintly of chlorine when you first turn on the faucet, but it disappears in moments. And for the first time in 2.5 months, the water didn’t smell like rotten eggs when I took a shower.

Now we just have to wait to see how long it takes for the smell to come back. If it’s weeks then we’ve got sulfur in the water and we’ll need to evaluate more long-term options. If it’s months, then it’s sulfur bacteria and we can hopefully get by with periodically shocking the well to control the problem.

Yeah. On the one hand shocking the well was so much easier than we expected. On the other, who wants to have to contaminate their primary water source with chlorine on a semi-regular basis? But then again, it’s still pretty damn pure water. And we know that for sure since we had it extensively tested before we bought the place.

The fruit trees are blooming, as are the tulips, and spring is definitely here. Finally!

Today was overcast but strangely warm, it finally started to rain just as the sun went down. I finished 90% of the hard work in the veggie garden today. That involved finishing 3 of the last 4 rows to be dug and raked. The only one left is for the tomatoes and since I’m not putting them out until next weekend it can wait.

After I finished the rows I transplanted 20 broccoli / broccoli raab starts and 20 lettuce starts. More than I intended, but we’ll just eat some of it really young to make room for the next round in the succession planting plan. The broccoli is mostly starts I bought last weekend as mine went weirdly leggy. When I picked them out at the plant sale I didn’t think about the fact that I was supposed to be transplanting broccoli in rounds of 8 starts - not 16! And since I ended up buying four varieties we’re a bit long on broccoli.

As for the lettuce, well, really I just should have thinned a lot better than I did a while ago. But since I didn’t, I transplanted A LOT of lettuce today. Oh well, we’ll just start cutting sooner than we normally would. Plus it meant that tonight we got to have salad made with today’s thinnings! Yum!

After all of that I ran out of steam. So tomorrow we’ll seed carrots, radishes, peas (finally!), bush beans and spinach. Then hopefully it will start to look like a garden and not just a bunch of dirt. The next round of lettuce, broccoli and basil are under lights, along with the first of the Brussels sprouts and dill.

Now the easy part starts right? I’m much more looking forward to weeding, seeding and harvesting than I did moving all that damn dirt! I’ve got a secret to share about moving that dirt, but I need to take a picture first…

Tonight I realize that what’s quickly becoming normal would have seemed extraordinary not that long ago. Mike got caught at work late tonight because one of his crew’s had the street opened and it was a mess. When we lived in the city a night like tonight would have gone like this: I would have gotten home first, maybe pulled a weed or two, collected the eggs, taken the dogs to the park and then gone inside and hung out to wait for Mike to get home. It would have seemed like a long wait and I would have likely ended up with the TV on.

Tonight, I got home just after 5:00. I corralled the cat for his afternoon meds, changed my clothes and headed outside. I spent 2.5 hours in the garden just enjoying the evening and digging in the dirt. I set up soaker hoses for the potatoes and asparagus, prepped two more rows for Brussels sprouts, broccoli, bush beans and squash. I watered the onions and the herb garden.

Then I walked out and checked on the chickens. The little girls were roosting on the roost bar for the first time, and Steve and the big girls were up on the shelf where they don’t belong but love to be. With 6 eggs in my pockets (yesterday’s too) and a beer in my hand, I let the dogs out of the yard and we headed out to the back field so they could run and sniff and chase each other through the tall grass.

I strolled behind them admiring the new leaves coming out on the trees and the puff balls where dandelions were just a few days ago. I smelled the cherry blossoms and admired the apple blooms. We checked on the blackberries - leaves but no flowers yet - and said hello to the neighbor’s steers.

When we’d had our fill of the last light of dusk we headed inside to do the dishes and make some dinner. Leftover local pork roast pulled and turned into bar-b-que sandwiches with California artichokes ready just in time for Mike to get home.

And while it was happening it just seemed normal. It wasn’t until Mike asked me what I did after work that it struck me that I’d done a lot of different things and never even noticed.