The first day of spring and we saw a Tree Swallow perching on our garden fence, a Violet Green Swallow buzzing around the yard, and a Say’s Phoebe as well. And since then nary a sign of any migrant bird species. That will be changing this next week most likely. We are about three weeks away from hummingbirds!!
So February went zipping past and most of March has followed. And what happened in the last eight weeks? Snow. Lots and lots of snow. Mostly I didn’t take pictures of it because what I really wanted to do is go wandering around on our new property. But all the snow was a hindrance to that activity.
We woke up to several inches of light fluffy snow covering trees and fences.
The bare ground which had been peeping out next to the house and under trees was back to being covered with whiteness. We had a few hours of semi-sunny skies and then it started up again.
So February was over and spring was beginning to seem possible. And it snowed again and again during March. More snow is predicted in this next week, but it won’t stick around because we’ve seen temperatures in the high 50’s this week. It feels amazing!
But in the meantime, more snow pictures to share.
The sun feels like it has so much more warmth and the ground is getting bare. Finally we were able to walk around on our new property, staying out of the snow drifts and avoiding puddles of ice cold water sitting on the frozen ground.
While we were walking around we saw signs of Elk, tracks included. That’s cool! I have a desire to plant some alfalfa all over the place to give deer and elk something yummy to eat. Maybe we’ll do that. We have lots of other things to plant first.
This is looking towards the creek from on top of the ridge above the hillside. There are some neat plants including some elderberry bushes, bitter cherries, Ponderosa pine trees, birch, and other deciduous bushes which we can’t identify yet because they have no leaves yet.
The snow on this side of the property is still pretty thick, and so frozen that walking around on top of it was quite feasible.
Since our first visit to our new acreage we’ve gone on a couple of other walks. Yesterday we walked down an easement ‘road’ which is nothing more than a tires track as far as we could before being stopped by snow. It’s about a half a mile round trip to that point. The track goes almost all the way to the creek where the community water well is situated. We don’t know where that is quite yet, but this will be a really neat long walk right out our front door and we will definitely have to remember to take our binocs with us for birdwatching. We saw an old nest from last year in the top of one of the bitter cherry trees. They are so pretty right now. The tips of the branches are a brilliant red color.
See the ground out the window? No snow!!!!
It made me laugh how much he was enjoying this sunshine on his head and fur.
We tried something new and scary this month. We trimmed Oro’s beak for the first time. It was a stressful experience for us, but not so much for the bird. He wasn’t scared. Pissed off, definitely, but not really upset once it was over. We have more work to do with his beak but it’s not as daunting as concept now as it was the first time.
More experimenting with our bread machine. We made a sourdough loaf. This is a white flour loaf. We’ll make a whole wheat loaf next, we think, going off on our own and seeing if we can create our own recipe.
Yesterday on our walk we saw the first Buttercups of the season. They are sparse at the moment but pretty soon they will be everywhere! A surer sign of spring than even returning migrant birdies. Yay!!
We planted a rhubarb plant and heard that our new batch of strawberry plants are being shipped this next week. I found our old planting spreadsheets from up White Mountain and now we have an idea when we can get away with planting peas and lettuce, and starting our pepper and tomato plants, and possibly some melons. We haven’t decided if we want to try melons again. We may need to put up some hoops covered with plastic to give them a better start and we don’t have the ingredients for doing that. Gardening is definitely in our immediate future.