Crocus Pushing Past the Winter

Yay! Crocus!

This is the second day they have been blooming in the back yard shrub border.  I think the ones under the giant white pine are still nestled in frozen ground.  The frost went very deep this year.  Very little shows any sign of life.  Since the snow has melted we have also had very little precipitation.  A nice spring rain might go a long way to making things pop.

Today after work, feeling less than my usual 50% these days, I think I pushed a bit too hard on yard work yesterday, I decided to forego working in the yard.  I have managed to cut back almost all of last fall's leaving, and rake several bags of leaves from the long border.  Many years I leave the debris in the shrub border simply because it adds compost over times to what I want to be more of a woodland setting.  This will decidedly be a leave it year.

I have planted some radishes, carrots, and a handful of peas.

Today though I also took my first pictures of my garden in 7 months.  And I took them with my phone.  I am mildly surprised with the quality.

What a tangle!  I usually trim this back in two stages, once right away,  and once it starts growing.  It is a sweet autumn and blooms on new wood. 

Clematis 'Josephine' , check back in six weeks!  It blooms on old and new wood so I seldom prune this at all.

Yesterday, this was a tuft of quack grass, which I managed to hit at just the right time to be able to cleanly weed it without the garlic chives present.  Today would have been too late.  Yay, me!  (Hate grass in the chives!)

The Japanese cypress has just a bit of green the bottom foot.  This is a wait and see...

Azalea 'Rosebud' I think did not survive.  If it did, I see no buds.  I will give it time, but no sign of "green wood".

Looks a lot neater than last week.  The shrub there, left center, is a forsythia.  The buds all froze off last year.  This year, it is unknown. 

Strawberries 'Honeoye' look good.  They usually start bearing two weeks before most.

Would you believe, in a planning meeting in like 1999, at Motorola, I uttered the words, "Who would want to take pictures with their phone?"

DUH!  Everyone!

(Of course as beta testers for texting, we thought the following message was in poor taste and lazy, too, "This is 4 U   pls call me  @ 2")

LOL, ya' all!

Gotta go rewind my DVDs!