Spring Is Springing If Not Yet Entirely Sprung

Barely three weeks ago, this was the sight that greeted us in the gardens just outside the town's front gate:

Yes, that's ice. The flowers around the fountain were doing it tough, too:

Today, the sky is as clear and blue as three weeks ago, but it's 14C. A good enough excuse to start the first vegie seeds of the season:

That's Cipolla Tropea Rossa Lunga, the long red onion from Tropea, Calabria, in southern Italy. Almost cigar-shaped, they're the sweetest onions you'll come across in a day's march. Absolutely delicious very finely sliced in salads.

And here are the seeds keeping warm in their improvised greenhouse until they germinate:

It's impossible to underestimate how thrilled L'Artista is every spring to have the espresso machine and every heater in the place loaded with seed trays inside plastic bags.

In the next week or so, it'll be time to start the tomatoes, capsicums, chillies and all sorts of other good things.

The distant thuds you hear is L'Artista beating her head against a wall.

In the meantime, there are winter weeds to clear.

Send down the sun, Huey.