Introducing...Your Monday Inspiration.

So here's another idea I've had lately: since I'm still fairly new to regularly blogging, maybe I should set up a weekly themed day, where every Monday I post...a thing.  You know, some blogs will have How-To Fridays, or Contest Tuesdays, or, I don't know, Wilderness Wednesdays, things of that nature...well, mine will be Inspirational Mondays. (Inspiring Mondays?  Inspired Mondays?  I'm still working on what to call it.)

People complain about Mondays, so that's a day when we could all use a bit of a creative pick-me-up, couldn't we?  Whether it's a project idea, an artist or artwork I like, a roundup of ideas along a certain theme, or just an everyday thing that I find inspiring.  Hopefully this will help me not only find interesting things to share every week, but will also help me get in gear and post on here regularly.

Today's Monday Inspiration is...
...maybe something that's mainly interesting to me, since it takes place in my kitchen, but it's one of those everyday little things that makes me happy: my seeds are sprouting!

Well, "sprouting" is not the word so much as "enthusiastically shooting upwards rapidly"...these tomatoes will need a new pot soon, I'm afraid.

Early in March, I planted seeds for cilantro, basil, and beefsteak tomatoes...I've grown all of these in this climate before with no issues, so I figured these would be good seeds to work with.  We also started seeds for a loquat tree this weekend, as well as three lemon trees.  I haven't grown a lot of things from seeds - my gardening strategy seems to be more like:

1. Buy small plant at nursery or Home Depot
2. Stick plant on porch
3. Forget about plant
4. Go to replant it weeks later only to find that it's not looking so hot.
5. Go buy another plant.

Sometimes.  Some things I've gotten to really thrive, like our dwarf orange tree!

The orange itself isn't a dwarf.  Just the tree is.

I do okay with herbs if they're not in direct sunlight.  The Arizona sun laughs in the face of herb gardens, right before it fries them to death.

So I have these guys in my kitchen for now, until they're ready to go into either bigger pots on our back deck (covered!) or into a planting bed on the north side of my studio (shaded!).

What makes these inspiring to me is the colors.  Something about the light green shoots, that new, young-looking green before the herbs turn darker as the plant ages, and the dark brown soil, almost black...it's such a springy color combination.  Not your stereotypical spring pastels (although as we have established, I like those too), this is the real color of spring for me.

In fact, I'm using this exact color combination in the painting I'm working on now...appropriately so, since the subject matter is a woman planting seeds in a green field.  It's been fun to try to capture the colors I've seen in my herb pots and put them onto the canvas.

This green color is also pretty close to the color of my studio walls, as you may have seen in other pictures I've posted...I like green, what can I say?

Anyone else have things that are inspiring them this Monday?  Inspired by the seasons, or stuff in your own backyard, or anything else?  Feel free to post comments about it!