It is time. (VIDEO)

Winter is over when I can turn the external water supply back on 🙌 (If this collection of footage looks completely random to you, you probably live in a climate where your pipes don’t freeze)

COVID has completely derailed my life for the last few weeks and honestly it’s been a rough recovery, both physically and mentally. Yesterday the sun came out, though, and I just couldn’t let the opportunity pass by to put my fingers in the dirt for the first time this season.

Behold! What was the potato and broccoli grow box last year……………

…………….is now the sugar snap pea (and Tig) grow box!

Haha prepping this one box and putting up the pea trellises absolutely wrecked me. Like, it took me a million times longer than normal and my body still feels like I got pulverized in a car accident basically two days later.

One box down, four boxes, one flat patch, and a bunch of side flower beds in both the front and back yards to go!

I sent my friend some pictures of my lemon blossoms and she asked how amazing they smell.

They did the first few days, I told her, but after that their scent got suuuuuuuper subtle, I really have to get my snoot in there and focus to smell them.

I mentioned this to Matt and he just said “Oh, honey.” with such pity in his voice, which is how I realized that my sense of taste and smell had not been extinguished from COVID (which is the only manifestation of that side effect I’d heard of) but had been greatly reduced.

It’s been a couple weeks since then and even though my recovery is going way more slowly and painfully than I’d like, I have, at least, regained a greater ability to smell my sweet little lemon blossoms again, so I’m grateful for that 🙌

Even more exciting is that I’ve got my first proto-lemon baby growing!!!!!!!

Because Lemony Snicket lives indoors during the colder season, it’s up to me to pollinate her by hand with one of my retired inking brushes. So I twizzle my brush’s bristles around the stamens and pistils (the long, fragile, wavey bits), transferring pollen from one neighboring blossom to the next like the world’s most monstrously deformed bee.

BEHOLD!!!!!! It looks like some of that transferred pollen may have clicked because that one pistil has dropped its style and stigma (the yellow tube with the orange-y bulb on the end), leaving that fat little green nugget bulb behind- which is, my friends, basically a lemon fruit fetus.

Oh-ho-ho.

Let the lemoning begin.

On one of my few excursions outside as I try to build my strength back up, Matt and I met this handsome and distinguished neighbor. 

We send you our best regards.