Garden update: Up here in the country every green thing has re-appeared. Every year is its own magic in spring. Finally, the oaks are leafing out from their original pink! toward green greener and dark green. At the moment, toward a light green. Even the 275 year old Resident Spirit oak never looked younger.

Because there's been over 70 inches of rain as well as days of over 90 degree weather, roses are coming on fast. In fact, the Cecile Brunner in the fir tree has come and gone, bloom-wise. The Souvenir de Malmaison has fat buds and they will very probably not last long because of the extremes of temperature, especially the hot days. This is one rose intended for a temperate clime. That's not here, I've learned. Snow and hard frosts are not unheard of in late April. Heat waves are common in early May. The sun's higher now and we should be starting with vegetable planting but we dare not before the end of May. Still I persist in treasuring the one in ten years when everything comes right and all the early roses bloom together, the plants we foolishly plant too early survive.

 The apple trees have bloomed and set fruit, all of them, except for the Jonagold. It's an every other year producer. Even the Santa Rosa plum which usually gets caught by frost has little fruits on it. The quince trees, the two older ones and the two younger ones, the hardiest fruit trees anywhere, I contend, are covered with astonishingly porcelain-like flowers. The fig's doing well though it really shouldn't here in this sink of ours at the bottom of Cahto Peak. We'll have a crop. Maybe enough for a real dessert, maybe enough for scarfing down as we stand there looking at the tree, one evening.Then there are the crabapples so excellent in bloom so much work later.  I'm not looking forward to the way the labor takes over whole days with making crabapple jelly--the two trees went crazy earlier with blooms every inch. Still crabapple jelly on a breakfast biscuit is pretty special.

Don's busy getting the vegetable beds ready--these are round beds! old wine barrels. This year they need to have gopher-stopping material put in the bottoms. Lots of hard work removing the dirt, fortifying it, then putting it back in over the new wire cloth.  Last year the critters broke through the wood bottoms. Down the road, Cindy and Eric have put in huge numbers of strawberry plants--the rows of them are doing fine. Last year it was several rows of strawberries and quantities of kale. This year they have reversed the order. I don't know how they deal with the gophers. Maybe they don't have them. Maybe the gophers haven't made over there. Yet. We tried berries for a couple of years, raspberries, ollalieberries: what the scarlet tanagers didn't get, the robins did. We'd think we had closed up every gap of the net and still the birds, clever guys, found ways in. --I'll never understand why people use the term bird-brain as an insult. We're too greedy for berries for ourselves and too lazy to beat off the birds with complicated netting systems.

We gave up with berries though we persist with a few grape vines along a fence. When the grapes are ready we scramble around finding the ripe bunches. Meanwhile, the pileated woodpeckers scream at us akk-akk-akk-akk, hammer d-d-d-d-d-d on the fence wood, and stare us down--we want those grapes/they REALLY WANT those grapes. It's hard to stare down a woodpecker's unstaring eye. Actually, we grab some bunches anyway and leave the rest to them. Then somehow or other tanagers hear about the crop and they arrive--they come by stealth rather than by woodpecker noise--and flock into the vines saying nothing. Unlike the woodpeckers who eat one grape by one grape, the tanagers strip the stalk--no idea how they manage so many grapes in one gulp. Some old-timers contend that the grape berries can ferment in birds' stomachs, making the birds drunk--? Who knew getting drunk could be so simple--all that smashing and stomping and crushing and straining, refining and bottling is completely unnecessary.

 It's overwhelming to go out in the garden right now: everything is healthy and growing fine and this is a good thing, and you feel right too. Then you look at all the jobs that need doing in the next two months, the weeding, the planting, the water system, the mowing, the hauling, and creaking about on old knees, and you don't feel right.  Every year I forget the garden's rule:  one thing at a time. I eat too fast.