The beauty of gardening is there is often the opportunity for astonishment. Here we are, mid April, the snow is still deep at elevation and here at 396’   it lingers. Stubborn. But it is slowly revealing the perennial beds.   The urge to get out there and clean up last years spent foliage is strong. I leave it over winter to act as mulch and it does so with great success, but now I’m ever so tired of it. I want to remove it, toss it on the compost pile, let the minor bulbs shine.  But then the ‘what ifs’ start. What if the temperature drops even though the ten day forecast says it shouldn’t, who hasn’t been fooled by that one? So there I am, gingerly cleaning up around what I consider to be super hardy perennials, trying not to uncover the foxgloves that I really and truly want to shine this year and that will succumb to hard freeze like we had this morning.  There have been mysterious perfectly round holes in the snow. I guessed that they were the results of ro...

  ‘The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day. When the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, And wind comes off a frozen peak, And you’re two months back in the middle of March.’ Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time, 1926

FIRE!  DROUGHT!  TORNADOES!  INVASIVE SPECIES!  RISING SEA LEVELS! This list of doom could get long but I’ll stop. The worst scenario we have going at the moment is waking up this morning to a Currier and Ives Christmas card. You might feel like enough is enough but don’t fear the snow, its adding much needed moisture and nitrogen to our environment. It really won’t stay around much longer. By late this afternoon all of the new snow had melted and the existing snow was attempting to. Patience. The greenhouse is holding its own. There is a high/low thermometer in there so we have a good idea of what’s happening. Also the fan automatically comes on which is excellent. I’ve had the door open a couple of times already ~ not today. There is a tendency to ask too much of a greenhouse. You really don’t want it to get too hot. I like a low of 40F and no higher than 80F. It has proven to be more difficult to control the higher temperature. There are vents and, of course the d...