April 6, 2012 -- cilantro and maple helicopters

What a beautiful day. Perfect spring weather--complete with wind. The most impressive things to me today were the helicopters hanging from the red maples, so I brought one tassel of them in. Also inside waiting to be included in this bottle was a glassful of leafy cilantro stems. Amazingly, they are already sending up the mature shoots that will bloom and set seed. But even more amazing is the fact that I thought I had only one cilantro plant in the garden this year (that's actually true), but today I found a ton of cilantro plants coming up in an open area near the barn. I count on cilantro to reseed without my intervention every year, but my one seedling in the garden proper had me worried. That's why I was so delighted to find a whole stand of cilantro coming up in an area where I'd thrown leftover seed last fall. (John had cleared the area of autumn olive, I had seen "raw" soil and pounced -- throwing leftover seeds of all sorts into it.) Reward: my fingers smell like cilantro and we'll have cilantro in our soup tonight.

I like the oak bark in the background of this photo.