My day started with a visit to my favourite morning chore, my chickens.

I eat fresh veg everyday and always save my scraps for my chickens.

They love the treat and the result in their egg quality is wonderful. One of my favourite fruit is watermelon, but whenever I buy it out of season, as I did here, it always dissapoints and goes bad or is too mealy. But, waste not want not, the chickens LOVE such a treat.

And whether it is Sunday or not, I visit these fellows each day to feed and watch them. They never dissapoint in antics and this morning was no different.

Here we see poor Leto, our faithful broody hen, wanting to sit on eggs for the joy of mother hood and two of her compatriots not caring and saying, "Move over, even though we have 7 other nest boxes, we choose THIS one to lay our eggs". The hilarity never ceases with these birds.

And thus far a #sublimesunday it is. I have my coffee and am out and about in the garden, which is my favourite place to be in Spring.

In my shade garden the lovely Hellebores are starting to give up their seed.

I'll collect this up and sew them in the shade beds. Gardening is a patient sort of past time. As these seeds will take three years before you even see a flower, but Gardening, much like painting, has its joy in the process not the end result. I garner just as much joy from seed planting as I do from looking at the beauty of the subsequent plant. That's sort of the secret of life too, but shh, don't tell anyone.

As we are in the shade garden, let's compare the lovely blue hosta's I am adding this year. I started three of these from tubers in the house in February. They are now getting ready to be planted in these beds. Here you can see how they are a cool dusty blue green compared to the striations of yellow and green of this varitey, of which I can't recall the name right now.

One grows hosta for their foliage, it is their beauty and what they are breed for, however they do make a lovely purple or white flower on tall stalks in later Summer. When they are first emerging this time of year from the ground, they look like little figures wrapped in long robes, sort of a series of Green Monks emerging from the soil or hands reaching up.

Hosta are great companions to ferns and I LOVE ferns.

This year I have started some Ostrich ferns indoors as well, also from tubers, and they are coming along nicely. If they were in the ground now through the winter they would only be little fiddleheads poking through the soil, but as I started these indoors they have a good start. Here they are still in their little pot with two more of my blue hostas, but they will get planted out soon. I am still taking them in at night right not, because New England can be tricky and you we could get a frost of a morning still.

What I love about the Ostrich fern is two-fold. They are one of the larger hardy ferns I can grow, reaching close to 5 feet! And their fiddleheads that come up in Spring are the edible variety used in restaurants and culinary circles. I love a plant that looks good and can also feed you.

Now, whilst we are still outside, lets pop around the corner to the sea-side of the house and take a peek at my sugar-snap peas I planted out last week.

Despite the cold salty wind in this new little veg garden, they seem to be latching onto the trellis wire. It's early days yet and in the new veg garden this is the only bed done and filled, but salad greens and snow peas like cold feet, so they are happy here. I am thinking of really over seeding this bed instead of just straight rows and see if I can get an endless salad bed to last throughout the Summer.

That is another thing I love about gardening: Trials and experiments.

It's fun each year to give something a try , a plant in a new place a new way of starting them indoors or trying a fruit tree in a pot, that sort of thing. Even the failures are still learning and it's all fun if you like to play in the dirt.

It's getting a bit chilly and my coffee has gone cold.

The story of my life a cold half filled cup of coffee. I start with a hot one full of hope of sipping it away and then I am distracted by drawing or chickens or plants. Yet, there is a bit of joy in that half filled coffee cup. It tells me I was too enticed by the current moment to even bother finishing it, that to me is a sign that I'm having fun in some way, but I digress.

Back indoors. It is quiet save for @winstonaldens typing away in his office. The smell of the cool salt air is now replaced with the warm scent of pipe smoke coming from the office filled with typing. I can hear the purr/snore of puss, sleeping away another Sunday morning.

Now her coffee would be ice cold by now.

And Monty is no different, just a slug-a-bed of a Sunday morning. Neither of them deigning to join me on my morning chicken and garden rounds.

In fact, this is Monty's favourite spot EVERY morning. We call this the 'sailboat sofa' for fairly obvious reasons, but it sits over one of the main heating vents and when the heat kicks on in the morning this sofa captures a lot of it and he loves to be partially under the skirt of it and he gets so hot. I am sure it is a boon to his old bones.

There was plenty of mornings this Winter when I was down there beside him, enjoying the heat whilst watching the wretched snow fall, but let's not think of Winter on a lovely grey Spring day.

Into the kitchen now, to get that fresh hot coffee. And while we are about it, why not show you some more of my plants happily growing away in the heat of the house.

My tomatoes are getting quite large, but again won't go outside until most likely the first week of June.

I am trying some of them out in my new seaside veg garden, but I am not too hopeful. They love heat heat and more heat and the ocean side of the house gets cool breezes through most of Summer, but we shall see.

Another veg I probably planted far too soon ( I just had the Winter Blahs and needed green growing things) were my cukes. They are happily growing away in the warm sun of the windows unaware of the cold sea air out there.

And because I planted them SO early, they began to flower a month ago. And I haven't a bee hive in the house, so the pollinator had to be me. Me and a handy paintbrush. It's kind of fun playing Mother Nature, though, and dapping at stamens and pistols and anthers spreading the pollen here and there. And it seems to have worked, the little cukes are happily fattening up. I have had to give them some seaweed food though, as they need nutrients now and as they are only in pots, I have to provide that as well.

I am going to try some of these in the seaside veg garden too, train them up the wall of the house in the garden, as it will absorb all the heat all day, but that salty wind might not be the best for them. Again, experiment and trial, in gardening and art.

Now, before we get that cup of hot coffee and pad quietly down the hall to the studio, let's look at my dahlias.

These tubers are sprouting nicely in the window and I am hoping in a week to take some of these little buds and a bit of the tuber and to start some new plants. These type of cuttings are the most successful to make more plants as you get a bit of that think tuber and it wants to make new roots. I love dahlias but they do have to be dug up and put in storage in the Autumn. Yet, again, another 'process' that is enjoyable and speaks of the coming Spring: Getting the dahlia bulbs out of their mulch filled boxes from down cellar. It let's you know Spring wont' be far away.

Well, I think I have spent enough of this #sublimesunday on a computer and need to return to enjoying it.

And enjoy it I shall. I think I will put off the studio a bit and take my hot cup of coffee out to watch the sea and bask in the grey cool day. The daffs are still blooming as we have been lucky with a longer later Spring, and watching their heads dance in the sea air is just the sort of thing I like to do on a day like today.

I hope you are having a #sublimesunday and enjoying some down time. It's so important to stop and literally smell the roses, or whatever happens to be in bloom at the time.

If you like my work please upvote and feel free to resteem and by all means leave comments.

---

Check out my other posts:

• Commission piece of a Basset Hound in a Chair
• To Bot or not to Bot: Singularity Drawing
• New sketch inspired by an old unfinished painting
• Pandora Singularity Progress
• Sunday in the Garden

---

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Dada
• Bescouted
• Sola
• Shop

My bitcoin wallet as per the @slothicorn request to provide it with your artwork.