Spring Is Nice But...

Friday was positively balmy. I walked quite a bit around town, so much my feet actually hurt. A high point was that I scared up a beaver by a stream! We stared each other down for several minutes, then the beaver won and I continued on my walk.

I decided it was the day to take up all the "mulch" over my bulbs. You may recall that we dismantled the Christmas Tree, then its boughs served a second life as mulch, and now it's going to a third use as fodder for the compost pile. So basically now we have a spruce bough pile.

This exposed all the little green shoots, so they could get sun and fresh air. In the few days since, the garlic bed has really gone to town. Check it out:



Then - shazam! - we had our first crocus!



(Those are the fallen pine needles on top of the normal mulch - I hope it doesn't hurt the little flowers.) It looks like I might have lost a fair number of my flower bulbs ... to the chipmunk, I think. There were all of these little burrowing trails running through our grass and flower bed after the first big snow melted.

But my daylily transplants seem to be about 75% successful. Yay for spring. Now I just have to prune the bee-ivy and grape vine, order seeds, build planting beds, buy soil, and on and on and on...

All of which is very exciting, but I have to tell you about a very decided downside of all this spring business. Uh...the smell. It was by walking to all different parts of town that I came to the conclusion I really wasn't imagining it. The town really does smell like manure. Which isn't that bad, except when you think you're having olfactory hallucinations because everyone's just walking around like normal, la-dee-da, while you are trying to figure out where the Odor is coming from.

It's a lovely town. The agricultural landscape is gorgeous. Hey, there is a herd of cows two blocks away. What did I expect?