It’s official!  Rachel and I got the final approved copy for TIGER TIGER.  It is available for pre-order at the Samhain bookstore.  I’m very excited.  The official release date is July 23rd.

Rachel and I are both Tauruses, and our birthdays were a couple weeks ago.  We had a lot of fun and are working on a new story together.  It’s a novel called BOUND and we’re almost done; we’ll submit it at the end of this month so stay tuned and keep your fingers cross.

Next up is EMERALD KEEP, the sequel to EMERALD FIRE.  Our Persis universe is dear to our hearts and we’re having a lot of fun with this one.  KEEP is full of intrigue and politics and we get to meet some more Shiners.  We also plan to submit a short to this year’s charity call.  The theme is men in uniform so we decided to try a short with one of the Seekers, the law men on Persis.  We’ll see what they say.

I hope your Saturday is going well and that you get to enjoy some of this lovely Spring weather.  We planted the gardens at the Beehive and will be putting in more plants today.  We found out that mint is a rat repellant so we have more mint to put in the main bed, in addition to the tea garden.  I’m very excited.

We decided to go round this year and put the flowers in the circular containers.  I have more flowers to plant so the rectangle still may get some use, but I like this look for the flowers.  I may have to move the crate, though, since I usually put the head of the hammock there.

This is the main raised bed.  For those of you who haven’t been following my Gardens at the Beehive posts, this is a ten foot by five foot raised bed, twelve inches deep.  I built it about 10 years ago with 4×6 treated wood and a 2 inch bedding of gravel on the bottom on top of a plastic sheet.  We had 9 tons of dirt and compost delivered and each year I add about 3 cubic feet of new material to bolster the nutrients.

When we plant, we cordon off square feet with kitchen twine so we can apportion the plants well.  Each of the tomatoes take about 3 to 4 square feet, though we put smaller plants around their feet – marigolds and lovage, this year.  The lovage grows tall so that’s the center seedling in the foreground.

This year, we planted tomatoes, chocolate pepper, several species of basil and have chard and mint still to go in.

This is our corner flower garden.  We didn’t find snapdragons this year, sadly, but have many johnnie-jump-ups and pansies.  I have more flowers to plant and rearrange before I’m done, but this is a start.

What Spring projects are you working on?