Spring Inspection Time

It's downright hot today. I had Aries put the shade up outside the big east-facing window this morning, so the living room is now a comfortably cool refuge. Then, he took off on a motorcycle ride with a buddy, so I did a little Spring inspection walk around the yard. The daffodils in the herb garden are fading (and will need to be deadheaded), but the first of the tulips and narcissus just opened up. The oregon grape is in bloom - a bright, cheery yellow.

The cellar is up to 50º, so later after it cools down outside, I'll have to get down there and start assessing what can still stay, what needs to be brought up to the refrigerator, what needs to be processed (frozen, dried, maybe canned), what needs to be on the menu this week, and what goes to the chickens. The two fig trees down there are starting to break dormancy. They'll need to be repotted and brought out to the sunshine, and then kept on the wagon to be moved in and out of the garage as the weather warrants. I know I need to get the Roots garden bed prepped, so I can get the seed potatoes stored from last year planted soon.

I've got a dead branch on the Italian prune tree, and it looks like another one on the seedling peach (a mature tree of unknown variety, so named because it just sprouted one year from under a woodpile - the seed probably buried there by a squirrel). The stresses from a drought winter last year and peach tree borer damages are showing up now, so I'll need to do some pruning. I've got one dead branch on a lilac, and I want to move a piece of another one over to fill in a hedge I'm making around a little picnic table. I think of my yard as the slowest form of artwork.

A little hawthorn tree doesn't look like it made it, but there's another sprout down by the vegetable garden that can be moved to take its place. The first strawberry blooms just opened, as did the pears. No asparagus yet - the chickens or rabbits have knocked down the fencing, so that needs to be redone - I hope they haven't destroyed the plants. The two artichoke plants survived the winter, but there's no sign of the rhubarb yet. It's Spring, today anyway, and there's work to be done.