When can we eat them?

This winter was so very hard on the garden. I hate to admit it, but we have been buying lettuce at the grocery store. Sigh. But there is hope. Today Joel moved the two flats of new little lettuces from the greenhouse into the cold frame to start hardening off. i planted asters, ornamental amaranths and ageratums in the greenhouse to replace them.
In the hoophouse the peas are coming up. We are trying to grow them there to see if we can thwart the golden crowned sparrows who have decimated the small pea plants almost every spring for several years.
It is warm enough at night for the frogs to start their spring singing I found this one under a board in one of the hoophouses.

Frogs

We have these little green frogs all over the place. We find them in buckets, in plants, in vegetable boxes. A customer at the Farmers Market brought one back to us that she had found in a bouquet of flowers. We found it a nice place (we hope) in Friday Harbor. In the spring the frog chorus from the marsh behind the house can be deafening. These frogs on the window are two of several who have been there for the last month. They wait until night when moths come to the light in the windows and then they feast.

Frog on Sunflower

Every year I grow lots of sunflowers for cut flower sales. I especially love all the new interesting colored ones. They come as singles, semi-doubles and fully doubled. This little frog was accommodating enough to let me go all the way back to the house for my camera and still be sitting on this striped sunflower when I got back out to the garden.

Tulips, Mosquitoes, Hummingbirds, Swallows, and

We've had company all week, my oldest daughter and her family so we haven't done much gardening and I haven't done much weaving or knitting. While they were here the weather finally began to feel springlike. The frogs in the marsh are very, very loud at night, I've seen the first hummingbirds at the flowering currant bushes as well as a white crowned sparrow at the feeder. I heard a common yellow throat this morning. And this evening we looked up and saw a huge flock of swallows, maybe 40 or 50 birds swirling around in the air over our clearning. They looked a lot like violet-green swallows but they were fast and high and could have been tree swallows which are very similar. I 'm not aware of having seen them here before but all the information I could Google about them mentioned them flying in large flocks. So that was exciting. I did see several pairs of violet-greens down at the dock on Monday and two at the farm yesterday. We usually have 3 or 4 pair nesting here. the barn swallows come later and I haven't seen any of them yet. We also saw the first mosquito last evening but we also saw a bat flying around. They are about the best mosquito eaters around.

The first tulips are in bloom, the early Greggii ones with the striped leaves. And I got a big box of bulbs, gladiolus, lilies, dahlias and onion sets. So we have our work cut out for us. A few warm days and the soil will dry out enough for some serious tilling.