A Mr McGregor Morning

Our garden is rabbit proof.  So you will understand that it was a shock, first thing this morning, to encounter Peter (or perhaps it was his sister, Flopsy) leisurely hopping through the garden sampling this and that.

There were even two rabbits, one off the two not at all afraid of me.

They are actually snowshoe hares, and as you can see, Flopsy still has a lot of her white winter coat, but the summer brown is on its way.

What to keep and what not to keep

A week ago I was complaining about winter, forgetting that in our climate we normally go from winter to summer. A week ago there was a foot of snow, but the last 6 days or so have been sunny and warm, the swallows are back, so are the frogs and you can work outside in shirt sleeves.

Days that follow the final melting of snow are important weeding days. Because the ground is still wet and most plants are half comatose after the long winter, pulling a weed (or digging out a plant to move it) is much easier than it will be in just a few weeks. The weeding you take half an hour to do just after the winter, takes several hours at other times of the year.

An April to Remember

This was one of the mildest winters we have had for a few years. A week ago, many bulbs were up. Little did we know that winter had just been postponed to April.

I did a quick collage selecting a few views of the garden taken in previous years, trying to match them with current photos.

The first is perhaps the most telling as the picture of the left was taken on April 25th of a previous year and the one on the right on April 9th of this year.

Road flooded

Once again this year, the road is flooded. It is not because of the heavy rain we had last week, and it is not because of the snow (you will notice the snow - a few days ago it was all melted and spring bulbs were blooming or about to bloom, when winter decided to give us one more whack).