Mother Nature's April Fool Joke

This is what we woke up to on April 1st, now I did not find it all that amusing. The last couple of days have been nice, with yesterday being in the 50's. Today and the next few days will be a whole different story, we are under a winter storm watch. As always the amounts vary, but seems a pretty good chance that we will have several inches of snow and high winds. I do not plan on going any where.



Last Monday I went to a program in a nearby town, it was offered by a local community college. The speaker was Duane Otto from the arboretum in Minneapolis, he is in charge of making the place beautiful. I really enjoyed it and the accompanying slide show. The number of plants he has to deal with truly boggles the mind, well mine at least. Each year the garden has a theme, this year it is Sky color reflections on water so all the flowers will be in shades and tones of blue and violet and water movement hues of white and silver. The beds will be planted in wave patterns to follow this theme. He showed slides of one year that he did a white theme, was truly striking. This year he will plant more then 10,000 tulips and 8,000 pansies. This is just the Spring portion, he will have thousands more plants so there is color all through the season. Makes what I do seem so trivial. After the meeting there were refreshments provided by a local greenhouse. Home made cookies and bars, coffee, punch all very good.



I was hoping to talk some about the show and local flowers but that was not to be, each person I was introduced to wanted to know who I was related to. It's a local thing, you get asked who you are related to and who's house you live in. After two years of this I find myself getting testy, trust me I do not want to be. There is just so much to talk about other then these two topics. The house thing I want to say, "I live in MY house", childish I know but it still oozes out. I think I offended one lady the other night, I declared "I am not from around here and I am not related to anyone". Some times I feel as if I have an alternate personality that peeks out now and then and says things I feel bad about later. If I meet her again I will need to apologize and see if I can make amends. My rational side knows that this behavior is what they are accustomed to and while it offends my New England reticence I know they do not mean anything bad by it. I grew up with my Grandfather and Grandmother for the most part. I was taught early on to not be nosy. You do not ask personal questions of anyone, if they offer you listen and then keep it to yourself. I would never dream of asking some of the questions that I get and often it throws me for a loop and I do not know what to say. I try and remember the advice Ann Launders gave, she said reply "why would you want to know?".

I bought seeds yesterday, so my project today is planting them in all my mini greenhouses. Also trying to figure out how to rig a grow light over them. I bought the bulbs and I know we have some of the fixtures around here somewhere. Now cross my fingers and hope they grow, always the hard part. Did I mention we bought a tractor? We found one at a good price , it runs and has a scoop on it. Too bad it is not delivered yet, I could use the scoop for the snow. So one of my tasks will be learning how to drive it. I can use it to clear old hay out of the goats house and move hay bales around as well as plow the garden and flowerbeds. Will make things much easier, I want to clear out the wooded area so can load limbs etc in bucket. We also have a couple of big piles of rocks that I want to use around flower bed and around the pond once it is dug. I have this whole scenario of a water course that babbles down to the pond. Of course we will have to build a bridge over it, so cool to have to much land to play with.

Wonderful weekend to you all and thank you for visiting.