Of The Many Signs Of Spring

 

The birds are back, big and small, and the weather a swinging ride. Mid seventies two days ago, last night a snow fall. Garden garlic is popping up, early varieties first. Ticks are up and about in the weedy reaches of the woods and the chorus of frogs singing every day, but this one. Ramps are up as well as some unwound bloodroot.

I have a rapidly thickening list of projects to tackle, the least of which is garlic and lawn's corn meal (nitrogen), lawn seeding where it had been turned to mud last year by heavy equipment, till, add compost, and plant potatoes received from Seed Savers, plant the native seeds stratifying in the fridge, chainsawing, chainsawing, chainsawing.

There is so much garlic mustard in the woods you'd think I didn't pull thousands of plants last year. I've tried to enlist the local scouts to help this year, but I have yet to hear back. There is much much much buckthorn, and I am blazing a new trail to get around the permanent inundation in the back slough, a trail that opens up the cedars and an unusually placed, young apple tree. There are bridges to repair or replace in every corner, all which will find their way onto the business page.

I have three or four or five art projects running. Just came back from New Mexico where I was making images of space over the border, another dealing with athletic fields, yet another of artists situated in landscape, and of course, Phenology.