March 2024: Blooming Time

February’s crocuses and early daffodils were the opening overture for the springtime blooms. March followed with a solid performance of flowers mixed with emerging leaves. March began with the last of the crocuses and the final two of my four hellebores. The magnolia started slow, and I was afraid that it had been frozen out by a couple warm-then-cool cycles in the weather. However, I shouldn’t have worried because it soon burst into full bloom.

The first ferns began to unfurl, the raspberries and blackberries leafed out, the redbud bloomed, and life generally returned to my garden. By the end of the month, there was more than the promise of spring. I could begin to hear echoes of summer approaching in all of the bright colors and bold blooms.

I still haven’t done much gardening for the year. I planted a small raised bed of lettuce, which then took its time to get growing. I also did some cleanup here and there, but that’s about it. I was out of commission with the flu for part of March and was traveling at the end, so it’s good there wasn’t really much to do. At this time of year, I just let the plants do what they want to do, and I’ll assess where we’re at once things get a little farther along.

February 2024: The First Signs of Spring

The first flowers are stirring in my garden. I saw my first crocuses around February 9, the first daffodil followed around February 20, and the snowdrops jumped in somewhere in between. One of my hellebores was probably blooming even before the end of January, but it is located pretty far back in my garden and it took a while for its low, nodding blooms to move above the leaf clutter. By February’s end, my other hellebores were blooming, too. I also have shoots of garlic showing above the leafy mulch in their bed, promising that the garlic has spent the winter growing underground. I’m always tempted to photograph every new crocus that blooms. I have different varieties scattered all around my yard, so it’s always a surprise to see another pop of color appear in one place then the next. After months of drabness, each one is a small celebration.

March 2023: In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lion

The saying goes that if March comes in like a lion it will go out like a lamb, and if it comes in like a lamb it will go out like a lion. Well, this March was bookended by tornado warnings. It’s also been pretty consistently rainy, so I haven’t been able to get into my garden to get any work done. I have not enjoyed this weather very much, though at our house we got through it all without serious damage.

The worst of the March storms for us came on March 3 when we had a tornado warning that included downtown Evansville. Tornados did touch down in the Evansville area, but at our house it was just the damaging winds. The Weather Service reported that we had 50-70 mph wind gusts. They were strong enough that we had a big branch break in the magnolia tree. I heard it crack and fall as I headed to the basement. My weather station isn’t very high up, so the wind speeds are never really accurate, but I will say that before that day I’d never seen it register a wind speed over 18. On the 3rd, its peak windspeed was 27. The storm also included at least three inches of rain and the all-time lowest recorded barometric pressure for our area. Even after the storms moved through, the very strong wind blew and blew and blew for hours. It was unrelenting.

Other than the storms, we had some warm days and then some cool days and then warm and then cold. I was grateful that the magnolia tree’s early blooms reached their peak before the cold weather moved in and edged their blooms in brown. Looking back, I like the look. In the later half of the month, we had lows in the 20’s, and that completely froze the magnolia petals, turning them completely brown while preventing them from falling off the tree. They’re still stuck on the tree and don’t look very attractive at all.

In March my late crocuses finished blooming and my daffodils began theirs. The hellebores grew and developed nicely. The two larger hellebores expanded and filled out beautifully. The two smaller plants were almost destroyed by slugs, but once I figured out that they were under attack and gave a counter attack, they each produced a single, fancy flower. I love the white flower with magenta dots, but I also like the way the light came through the all-pink double bloom.

By the end of the month, the hops was up, and so were the ferns. The redbud was budding. Also, enough green stuff was popping up everywhere to give everything a decidedly fresh, green color. In terms of edible plants, my garlic started to emerge, and it looks like most of what I planted survived. I also started my tomato plants under a couple grow lights.

February 2023: Something New Every Day

I began February feeling like things were a little behind. Often I will see my first crocus blooms by the last couple weeks of January, but there was no sign of them this year. I have several very early varieties of crocus, and I love the little hints of spring that they bring to my yard just as the brown, cold, dull winter is starting to feel tiresome. It always impresses me to find their blooms shining among the dry leaves in January.

January is also the time when I typically see the fresh hellebore leaves and blossoms emerge from the ground. They sort of crawl out of the earth with tight, dark knots of leaves and buds. Slowly their leaves expand and the blooms open. Typically, the blooms face downward, but as the days pass their flower stalks grow longer and the flowers rise higher and lift a little more skyward. Still, they’re tricky to admire and tough to photograph. They’re beautiful flowers, though.

Not seeing any blooms, I was starting to get a little worried. But then in the first full week of February I spotted my first crocus, followed by the second only a few days later. Soon, the hellebores were showing signs of emergence. Spring was underway! From that point, things started to move along quickly, picking up more and more speed as they went. Every day while Perry and I were out on our walk, I would notice a new crocus blooming, new hellebores appearing, new leaves, and finally the first signs that my garlic made it through the winter and was sprouting happily. Some of my favorite surprises were the reticulated irises that I always forget about until I suddenly see their delicate blooms in my garden.

Some of my daily surprises happened indoors, like my Venus flytrap that I’ve managed to keep happy for nearing a year. It’s even blooming now! Also blooming is an orchid that I haven’t gotten to flower in a while. Outdoors, I heard a series of sweet little birdcalls and realized that after almost 15 years I finally had a couple of chickadees gracing my yard. They’re such sweet little energetic birds with such a crisp black and white color scheme. I’ve always loved them. They joined my usual flock of tufted titmice, cardinals, and juncos along with the ever-present house finches, house sparrows, and starlings.

February ended with a bang–the magnolia tree going into full bloom. It felt very early to see such an explosion of flowers. Looking back through several years of my garden photos, this does look like this may be the earliest it’s bloomed. A couple other years it bloomed a week or two later than it’s blooming now, but most years it was blooming a full month later than now. I’m just glad that this early bloom didn’t get caught in a freeze!

Even with everything popping up on a daily basis during February, there’s still more to come in March. I’ve had quite a few pleasant surprises already this month. And I’ve gotten my vegetable garden started indoors. At the end of February I started my tomato seeds and started some of last year’s sweet potatoes sprouting. By March, I was seeing signs of sprouts. Stay tuned!

April 2022: Spring Unfurls like a Fern

It’s amazing to see the changes that took place in my garden during the month of April!

The month began with the earliest blooms, which were mostly crocuses, still happening around my garden. The ground in my garden beds was still predominantly brown with some tufts of new green scattered here and there. By the end of the month, I was enjoying a riot of color and too many shades of green to count. The mid-spring blooms, including most of the daffodils, came and went, and we had moved on to the late spring bloomers like the tulips, tiarellas, and irises. By the end of the month, my garden beds were fully carpeted in lush, rich greens, and it felt like my garden was singing.

To get from the start to the finish, so much needed to unfurl from the earth. It all began small and compact before growing rapidly and expanding to quickly fill the available space. The process is pretty incredible to watch. You can see it happening in the photos below. If you flip through them, you’ll see the same plants getting bigger and broader through the month. You can also see the more short-lived flowers pop up and then disappear. Some of my favorites are the ferns whose tightly curled fronds make beautiful and interesting shapes.

I tend to feel like the end of April through the end of May is the best time in my garden. June brings heat with it, and the plants feel like they begin to shrink back a little in order to conserve their moisture. That, and my vegetables tend to get too big and too messy about then. Till then, everything will stay on the upswing of expansion and bright greens of new growth.

March 2022: Everything is New Again

March was a great month for being continually surprised by new blooms here and there around my yard. I would be out walking Perry the Cat when I’d notice a new fleck of purple or yellow popping up. There was a lot of promise at the beginning of the month with many old regulars appearing and the knowledge that there were many more in the ground yet to emerge.

Unfortunately that promise had dulled a bit by the end of the month. Many beautiful things bloomed, don’t get me wrong, but quite a few new bulbs that I’d planted last fall never appeared and several of my existing bulbs didn’t return this year. For instance, I’d planted a bunch of dwarf irises last fall because I loved the ones that I planted a couple years ago, but of all the bulbs I planted I only had two blooms. Still, I love the fancy little flowers.

And for the first time in the more than ten years that John and I have been living in this house, a cold snap wrecked most of the magnolia blooms so the usual show was extremely muted. We’d had a pretty snow the evening before the cold snap, and I ran around the yard taking some photos before it was gone. Then we had a couple days with lows that dipped into the teens and that was what destroyed the magnolia blooms. Our friends who’d owned this house for decades before us had warned that it sometimes happened like that–so we have been lucky that it hadn’t happened before now.

One of my favorite early bloomers are the hellebores. I got my first one because I was intrigued by the name, and then I found out how wonderful they are as plants. They look amazing as they crawl out of the earth with a mass of new stems in late winter when most other things are still dormant. You can see them in the photos below. The first one I got is the dark purply one. Then I got the one with the beautifully creamy double blossoms edged in red. I’ve seen photos of the kind with speckled blooms and I’ve wanted one of those. A couple years ago I attempted to get one that was all purple with speckles, but the cats almost killed it by napping on top of it during its first, spindly year. This was the first year it bloomed, and it was the last one to do so. Last year I got one that promised fancy white flowers and magenta spots, and this year it bloomed exactly as advertised and very beautifully, too!

Meanwhile some of my other early perennials are starting to emerge including tiarellas and heucheras. I’d meant to do some cleaning and weeding all winter when the perennials were dormant but the weeds (mostly creeping Charlie) were green and easy to see. However, I never really felt like coming out to weed in the cold, so the creeping Charlie kept creeping. A couple weeks ago I attempted to carefully pull it out of my garden. It’s a really tricky job because it’s low and sneaky and entwines itself around other plants and bits break off to regenerate, which also reminded me why I hadn’t done it sooner.

I’d also meant to pull my hops out of their pot and trade out some of the old soil for new, since they’ve been less vigorous in the last couple years. But I looked at the hops I saw they were already well underway (surprise!), so they’ll have to make do with what they’ve got. They’re another plant that quietly gets a head start every year before I expect to see any plants.

I’ve started preparing some sweet potatoes indoors, I got a small patch of salad greens going in my garden, and I planted tomato seeds, so I’m slowly working my way toward a new year of harvests. The raspberries and blackberries are coming out of dormancy, and the garlic is showing more signs of growth. I have plenty of work to do in April to get my garden going now that the earth is waking up.

Meanwhile, in mid-March, John and I saw that Scratch Brewing was celebrating its 9th birthday with a special weekend of unique beers, some of which would not be offered at any other time. We decided we needed a short weekend getaway, so we planned another trip there.

If you recall, we first visited Scratch last October, and we had a wonderful time. Scratch brews really unique beers, many of which incorporate ingredients that were foraged from the woods around the brewery. Some taste like you’re drinking a tree, some are fruity, some are smoky, and all of them are delicious–or at least John and I think so. The day’s menu in the tasting room is below so you can read through it. We both especially liked the one brewed with green tomatoes, the one brewed with marigolds, and the one brewed with paw paws, but all the beers we tried were incredibly drinkable.

The one thing that we were a little disappointed about was that their food menu only consisted of two sandwiches. I guess they had wanted to streamline the food prep so their staff could focus on serving lots of beer. When we’d been there in October, there had been several different food options so we’d been able to sit around eating and drinking until we’d spent the entire afternoon there. The sandwiches that we got were absolutely delicious, but with only two options we were finished much sooner than we’d expected.

After we’d eaten and drunk our fill, we went to the nearby Piney Creek Ravine Nature Preserve to hike and to see the Native American rock art that is there. At first the trail wasn’t very clear, but we slowly found our way into the ravine and across two streams and found the rock shelter with the art in it.

When we got there, I really wished I’d known to research the art beforehand. It’s been nearly destroyed by time and by so many, many years of graffiti. It was difficult to see where the ancient petroglyphs were under all of the newer names, initials, and dates. We managed to find what we thought were a couple. We would have identified more if I’d have looked it up ahead of time.

In the second-to-last photo below, you can make out a V shape on the left and you can just barely make out two human shapes on the bottom right. The human shapes are lighter colored against a rusty background. On the boulder in the last photo you can see a squiggle that runs horizontally above Louis’ name. There’s a kind of a bird shape at the start of the squiggle. Those are all examples of the petroglyphs.

February 2022: Ice Storm!

When I wrote and posted my January 2022 garden update, we were waiting for an ice storm to arrive. The ice storm was the most notable thing to happen in my garden in February, so most of the photos below are from it.

They had predicted up to a half inch of ice accumulation on trees, which was the major concern. This area had a massive ice storm in 2009 with very significant amounts of ice on trees and power lines and things like that. A lot of trees and big limbs went down. A lot of people were out of power for days. It was very cold in the aftermath. So everyone around here was especially on edge worrying that things would turn out like that.

In the end, we got some ice accumulation but not enough to cause significant problems. We did get at least a couple inches of sleet that accumulated. There’s a lot of white stuff on the ground in the photos below, but almost all of it is in the form of little ice pellets, not snow. It was beautiful with everything encased in a layer of ice and sparkling when the sun came out.

The rest of February was drab and brown for the most part. My first crocus appeared on February 11, which is actually a little on the later side. The first couple of crocuses are in a south-facing spot that’s close to the house, and often they’ll be up and blooming in January.

We got several stretches of colder weather all through February with overnight lows in the teens, and there was another dusting of snow that didn’t amount to much. Toward the end of the month we got some really big rains, with over 2 inches coming down on one day followed a day later with another 1.5+ inches.

At the end of February, I had an assortment of plants preparing for March blooms. They included more crocuses, snowdrops, and hellebores. Other spring bulbs like tulips and daffodils were popping up, too.

Before the ice storm, I decided to make a couple more shelters for the outdoor cats. There were a couple warm-ish days to make them in, so I took advantage of that. I already had the two “cat pods” on the porch. They’re pods made from two large plastic storage bins stuck together. There’s insulation taped to the inside. They go around two cat houses that are also insulated and contain a heated cat bed. The pods also include a base with insulation on it to keep the cat houses off the cold cement.

I’d made the pods to help keep the outdoor guys warmer on the coldest nights, but cats have a pecking order and that’s where the problems continued. Spike is the top cat in my yard. What he says goes. He’s not related to any of the other cats, so he has no familial alliances. Spike gets the first pick of cat houses and he can tell the other cats which houses they’re allowed to sleep in and which they aren’t.

Boo Boo gets the Number 2 slot. He’s big and bulky and acts as Spike’s henchman, providing the muscle to back up Spike’s threats. As a result, Spike lets Boo Boo share in the choice sleeping spots. Often they’ll sleep together. I think Spike knows Boo Boo’s bulk will help keep him warm. However, Boo Boo is the brother to all the other cats in the yard. Boo Boo looks out for himself first by keeping Spike’s favor but secondarily he looks out for his brothers.

Junior gets the Number 3 slot. He seems to go along with everything and doesn’t rock the boat, so Spike lets him have some of the prime sleeping slots as long as Spike doesn’t want that spot at the time. Junior has to get out if Spike tells him to get out. In the super cold weather in January 2021, Spike and Boo Boo let Junior sleep in a heated cat house with them. I suspect they knew they needed his extra warmth (and this is why I decided to add extra insulation this year).

Last of all is Mark. Everybody hates Mark for some reason. He’s not threatening, and he’s a sweet guy, so I don’t get it at all. Spike has decided that Mark can’t have any of the prime sleeping ever. Mark can’t sleep in any of the heated cat houses on the porch. He has to sleep in our neighbor’s garage. The one exception is that Mark is allowed to sleep in the cat beds on TOP of the cat pods. Boo Boo will often curl up with Mark in one of those cat beds.

I’m not sure what kind of nook or cranny Mark has found in our neighbor’s garage, but he survived the super cold weather last winter so it must be adequate. Still, I felt badly for him, which is why I created the two additional cat shelters. I put them in our neighbor’s yard hoping they were far enough from Spike’s domain that Spike wouldn’t care if Mark was in them.

To make them, I got two sizes of plastic container–one that would fit inside the other. I cut door holes in both and wrapped the inner one in bubble wrap-style insulation. Then I put it inside the larger box and stuffed straw in between the inner and outer boxes for more insulation. I also lined the inner box with straw for sleeping on. The door to the inner box is aligned to require the cat to enter the bigger box and make a 90 degree turn to get into the smaller one, hopefully to block even more wind. During the ice storm, the pawprints on the ground clearly showed that Mark used both boxes, so I was glad.

November 2021: Rapid Changes

At the start of November, we still hadn’t had any real frost and definitely no deeply freezing weather. That changed soon. On November 1, I went out and picked all my beans because freezing weather was imminent. I got a lot of lima beans, but not nearly as many cowpeas. I need to stop growing cowpeas and start growing more limas in their place because the same pattern has held for several years now.

I thought my cowpeas were doing really well this year, too. Especially the odd ones that looked a lot like lima beans. But it turns out the cowpeas that were growing well were actually limas. They were labeled “black-eyed” and didn’t say pea or bean after that, so I just assumed they were a weird kind of black-eyed pea, even though I noticed the seeds were pretty broad like limas when I planted them. Oh well. Since the real cowpeas didn’t do so well, these limas had plenty of room to expand.

After the beginning of the month, the frosts came repeatedly. First there was a little frost damage here and there. Then a little more. Next the maple trees lost their leaves. Some time later it was the magnolia. Gradually the hosta leaves were edged with yellow, then they were fully yellow.

Finally mid-month the freezes started coming. The hosta leaves gracefully lost their structure and collapsed as the water in their cells burst their rigid cell walls. From here they eased into softly folded fabric. The more severe freeze was also the point when my sweet potato vines finally started to die back and I decided I should harvest the potatoes. I had hoped for a bigger sweet potato harvest, but it really was decent, and we’ll have plenty of sweet potatoes to eat. I planted a sampler mix of three different colors, which will make them even more tasty.

In all of my cleaning and organizing in my garden I spotted several garden spider egg cases and three Carolina praying mantis egg cases. Hopefully that will mean some nice insects next summer. I’d seen several praying mantises around my garden this past summer, but I wasn’t sure whether they were the native Carolina variety or the inasive Chinese mantis that is infamous for killing friendly insects and even hummingbirds. Seeing the egg cases, it looks like I have the native kind.

And this month saw several nice blooms around my garden. The toad lilies kept going until the harder frosts, and the marigolds bloomed until the hard freeze. The zinnias were beautiful even as they were killed off by the cold. And I had some sweet autumn crocuses that I’d planted only a month or two before. They’re the flowers that saffron comes from, though I didn’t attempt to harvest the stigmas.

By the end of the month, everything there was to harvest had been harvested, the dead vines were cleared, and the leaves blown into my garden beds to tuck everything in for the winter. It’s time for things to rest.

March 2021: Another Day Another Flower

I’m a little behind in posting my review of the month of March. Partly I was making sure I had a batch of new cat photos posted here. But also I’ve been busy taking more photos of all the new things growing and blooming and changing before my eyes.

There was certainly a lot of that happening in March. At the start of the month, things were mostly brown and covered in dried leaves. First came the crocuses–one here and another there, always surprising me with a new color in a new spot. I’ve scattered them in a lot of places around my garden with that in mind. The irises came soon after. This is only the second year I’ve had them blooming in my yard, and I love their pops of color. Then came the snowdrops–all descended from a clump I took from a spot where an old farmhouse was torn down.

Along with all of these blooms were the hellebores. I’d never heard of them before I started my garden, but now they’re some of my favorites. They fill the early garden with color and vegetation. Their flowers are frilly and fancy, though if I’d realized how much they hide these pretty flowers by facing them downward, I would have planted them closer to the edge of the bed where they would be easier to admire.

Then came the big show: the magnolia tree. Every year, it’s a magnificent show. The blooms last for several days, making a beautiful progression from buds held on the limbs like candle flames to newly-opened blooms that are fresh and bright to aged blooms edged in brown bruises and then to the aftermath of petals strewn over the ground.

In the middle of the magnolia blossoms, the daffodils began blooming. Like the crocuses, I’ve got a wide variety planted throughout my garden, so they surprise me with new color patterns popping up at different times and in different places.

As the daffodils started to bloom everywhere, many other perennials began to make their presence known. Ferns began to unfurl. Each variety has its own patterns of growth as it emerges from the ground and expands into the garden. There’s also a patch of the native wildflower trillium that appeared around this time, followed by the fritillaries, whose little checkerboarded lanterns I love. Around this time, the blackberries and raspberries began to leaf out, the hops emerged from the ground, and the irises began to expand to fill their section of the garden with their bright green blades.

In food news, I was able to eat some garden harvests in March. I finally finished the last of the sweet potatoes that I harvested last fall. I roasted them to make a side dish for a balsamic chicken. And the lettuce that’s been biding its time all winter under a plastic dome is finally exploding, providing tasty early season salads.

And all month, I held off on new spring plantings, not wanting to have things ready to grow outside before the weather was warm enough for them. Just before the end of the month, I got my tomatoes started. On the last day of March, I had tiny seedlings in each of my six seed pots. In April, I’ll start a few more types of seeds indoors, but I’m trying not to rush.

February 2021: Ice and Snow

In this month’s review of my garden: a surprising amount of snow and ice!

Near the beginning of February, we had our first round of snow. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to record the cats’ tracks, so it was official. I took some photos, just in case there wasn’t any additional snow for the winter. During the winter of 2019-2020, there was only one dusting that came in November, so it wouldn’t have been unheard of. Also, on the first day of February I sighted my first crocus, so there was the promise that spring was on its way.

But in retrospect, I didn’t even remember that it snowed that early in February until I went through my photos for the month, because less than a week later we got more wintery weather than we’ve had in years. First came an ice storm. Thankfully, in our area we didn’t get enough ice to do major damage, but we did get enough to provide me with some really nice things to photograph. The rain and sleet started in the morning and continued off and on all afternoon and into the evening, so it built up quite a bit.

Normally around here we would expect everything to melt right away, but the ice was followed by very cold temperatures. Then came a significant snowfall, then extremely cold temperatures, then more snow. In all, we may have gotten 8-10 inches of snow, which was actually less than the forecasters had thought was possible.

We woke up to snow on on the ground on a Monday, then it started to snow again around noon and kept snowing all of the rest of the day. That same week, we got more snow on Wednesday-Thursday. It’s very unusual for this area, but we had ice and/or snow on the ground for about a week and a half, and it stayed well below freezing for the entire time. That created fantastic conditions for cross country skiing! I got mine out. On the first couple days while road conditions were still bad, I only was able to ski down my street and down the alley behind my house. It was still fun!

The predictions at the beginning of all this snow and cold were really dire. In the end, we all made it through in good shape. I was particularly worried about the outdoor cats because temperatures and windchills were going to be so low. They all have spots where they hide from the bad weather, including the heated cat houses on my porch, but I don’t think those cat houses are built for this kind of cold. They’re insulated, waterproof, and heated, but don’t keep the wind out, so at the last minute I added some cardboard boxes as wind baffles. I also made a shelter for their food and I made sure their heated water dish was stocked. The cats managed to stay warm enough, though on the coldest nights there were three cats piled together for warmth in a single house.

Because it was so cold and windy, the first round of snow was beautiful but not particularly photogenic. It didn’t clump into nooks and crannies around my garden nor did it act as icing on top of everything. The second round of snow was a little better for photos.

I have a pair of cross country skis, but I rarely get to use them. Around Southern Indiana, even when there’s enough snow to get them out it’s usually just barely enough snow or there’s a thick layer of slush under the snow or the temperature hovers around 32 degrees so it’s pretty melty. It was really remarkable that we had lots of snow, it was frozen all the way to the ground, and it stuck around for almost a week.

Once the roads got a little better, I wanted to find someplace other than my street to  ski. We don’t have a car that’s built for snowy weather, so I didn’t want to venture too far away and get stuck in a parking area or something, so I stayed pretty close to home. John drove me to the levy near downtown Evansville, dropped me off, and came to get me when I was ready to go home. Years ago, I had friends who would go sledding there. Not many people go there now, so it was perfect for skiing. I had the place to myself and no one disturbed my trail once I’d created it. The water level in the nearby creek was also remarkably low, so there was a nice space between the creek and the levy where I could ski. Other years, I’ve gone along the top of the levy, but the wind had blown some of the snow off up there this year.

I went skiing for four days in a row. By the end, I was tired, but I knew an opportunity like this comes along so rarely that I had to enjoy it while I could. Each day I went a little farther, and the last day I went pretty much as far as I could. I skied from Waterworks Road to the Veterans Parkway/US 41 on ramp and back. Each day, there was a different mix of being overcast, overcast with some breaks in the clouds, and sunny with clouds. It was a pretty spot to ski, even though I was only skiing there because there weren’t many other options.

After the last day of skiing, I made myself some hot chocolate in my special bunny cup. When I was a kid, my mom would sometimes make us hot chocolate after we went skiing, and that was the main time I got to drink out of my bunny cup, so that’s what makes it special.

Once the thaw came, it came quickly, which was nice. There weren’t lingering ice piles or partially melted snow on the roads. Temperatures shot way above freezing and stayed there. Quickly, more crocuses appeared. And, I have a wonderful array of four orchids that are now blooming in my window. There are bits of spring and hope everywhere!

But then on the last day of February it rained and rained and rained. Overnight we got about 2 inches of rain, breaking local rainfall records. There was a pause in the rain, then it started again. In the end, my rain gauge recorded over 3 inches of rain. In the middle of all of it, my front bottle tree reached its breaking point and tipped over into the yard. Luckily, the ground was super soft from all the rain and cushioned the landing. I managed to pull all the bottles and Christmas lights off of the trunk, and then John wrestled it out of the way. I’m still trying to decide what to do with it. I might try to prop it up with stakes. I don’t think I’ll leave it on its side on the ground, though. It’s just not speaking to me as an art piece while looking like that.