Gardener, interrupted

I'm taking a brief cheese-and-cracker-and-blogging break before I head back outside into this gorgeous spring day for more gardening chores. These are chores I love, and I have spent every naptime in the past few days getting outside again. All my perennials are waking up, poking pale, raw looking spears of furled leaves up from the dark mulch. I've been looking around outside, trying to see what made it through the winter and what didn't. The winter was so mild here in NC this year that it would seem that all my plants made it, even the semi-tropical lantanas that I love in spite of having to replant most every year. There's nothing quite like coddling plants that shouldn't make it through the winter to make me feel like I know what I'm doing in the garden, even if I had nothing to do with the weather!

What I've done so far in the past couple of days:

1. Put a top dressing of composted manure on most of my flower beds.
2. Planted coneflower, coreopsis, Shasta daisies, and red bee balm seeds. (Perhaps it was a couple of weeks early, but I couldn't stop myself. And anyway, seeds are cheap.)
3. Re-planted 8 variegated Chinese privet shrubs that I had to relocate when we had a new wooden fence installed in our backyard.
4. Relocated 2 large-leaf hydrangeas, saving them from a near-deathly dry spot next to a storage shed.
5. Planted a big one of these beautiful, white Lady Banks roses to cover said storage shed and clamber up over my daughter's tree house. I can't wait to see it take over! Supposedly, it doesn't take long.
6. Re-planted assorted daffodil bulbs and one lone fern. The daffodils won't bloom this year as a result, but I should have quite a nice patch come next spring.

Alright, cheese-and-cracker break is over with. I'm sure some of you non-gardeners out there are just bored stiff, but I wanted to account for my absence from the blogging world lately. Being out in the garden is just irresistible this time of year...