Spring Comes Early, I Think

Despite the calendar that says spring arrives next week, I think it has arrived early this year. At least, I guess it’s spring that has arrived. It’s hard to tell, when we really didn’t have much of a winter.

We were talking with one of our neighbors this weekend and he asked if our asparagus was coming up (his was). Asparagus in March? As soon as we got home we had to rush out to check, and sure enough, ours was coming up too. I can’t remember when it made an appearance this early. The first asparagus of the year is always a welcome sight to me!

But I shouldn’t be surprised. Spring is all around us. Our lone forsythia bush is blooming. That’s a sure sign of spring.

And the dwarf flowering cherry trees out front are opening as well. They’ll look like little snowballs when all the blossoms open up.

The bees are convinced it’s spring. They’re keeping busy bringing in pollen and nectar from early sources. In the photo below, the arrows point to bees loaded up with pollen in the ‘baskets’ located on their legs.

Spring means it’s time for more chores in the garden. I cleaned out the bed with the overwintered onions today, then added a little organic fertilizer. This is the Walla Walla variety I planted back in mid October. I’ve got another bed ready for planting some spring onions shortly.

Now I need to clean out the bed with the overwintered spinach. In addition to the spinach, it’s full of chickweed and dead nettle. I predict the spinach will be bolting in a couple of weeks, so I guess I don’t have to be too thorough with my weeding. It will be replanted with something else soon enough. We have certainly enjoyed having spinach all winter, weeds or not.

The bed with garlic is considerably less weedy. The straw mulch helped keep the weeds down, no doubt. This is the experimental bed with the 8″ spacing. We will see if that results in larger bulbs. Behind the garlic you can see some leftover fall turnips that are flowering already. And if you look closely you can see a sea of dead nettle blooming!

One other sure sign it’s really spring is an almost finished bluebird nest in one of the PVC nest boxes. Mama bluebird built it in record time, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see some eggs laid in there very soon. I’m guessing this is the same pair that nested here last year.

I know we will have some more cold weather before March is over, but in the meantime we are enjoying the spring-like weather here. I don’t know when summer weather will arrive, but I’m in no hurry just yet!