The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

A promise of spring

Spring flowers

The big question on many gardeners' minds this year is --- will spring eventually catch up, or will the cold winter push even our frost-free date further into the future?  Both wild plants and those in the garden are running behind schedule this year, with most of our earliest spring wildflowers just starting to unfurl.  I finally saw a dandelion blooming in the yard this weekend, and the grass and clover are beginning to grow, but it will be another couple of weeks before we can put our chickens into their pastures.

Blueberry buds 

Apple budSo far, it's a bit hard to tell whether the dormancy of our perennials is due to the slow spring or to cold temperatures nipping flower buds.  The blueberries are starting to wake up, but peach flower buds still look small and shrunken.  On the other hand, apple flower buds are just barely beginning to swell, suggesting that the apple crop, at least, may come through for us this year.

I thought I'd close with a quote from my weather guru.  "Keep the faith," he wrote.  "Spring will come...the April 15 to May 15 period being CERTAIN to result in a glorious rebirth of the mountain landscape...as dictated by Mother Nature's Time Clock (even though everything is running BEHIND the time schedule right now...it will catch up during this dependable period)."

So there, you have it --- a promise of spring!  No matter when it comes, spring will get here eventually.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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