Windy and Waiting
Waiting, waiting . . .
I'm waiting for the cold to be over. It's fifty degrees and too windy to be outside comfortably. The garden is in all readiness, with green showing at soil level as plants wake up, and the tiniest of buds held tight in branches, and masses of giant catkins in the aspen trees.
I don't remember catkins last spring -- is this the result of our wet winter, while last year's winter was bone dry?
Fuzzy catkins sparkle in the sun and dangle like giant chandeliers all over the trees. They drop to the ground in big piles where they collect like a nest of woolly caterpillars. They blow in the door and come in the house on our shoes and scare me when I spot them on the floor. Eeek.
We've had a few nice sunny spring days where we could sit outside a bit. The cushions are back on the patio chairs. Tim our handyman comes next week to replace the burst outside faucet fixtures.
I hung the hummingbird feeder on the patio and another on the front portal, and it's another thing I'm waiting for -- some early scouts to visit.
But it's still cold, below freezing last night, with snow showers of maybe an inch predicted tomorrow night. Even on nice days we've had a lot of cloud cover.
The wind. Boy, does it get windy here in spring. And wind kicks up the dust. I don't know if your phone or monitor shows this National Weather Service graph large enough to see, but the red bars are the strongest mean winds, and Santa Fe's red bar (graph in the bottom left corner) is in April.
Las Vegas (NM, not Nevada) and Tucumcari are towns to the east of Santa Fe on the plains side of the mountains, and they get the strongest spring winds. Las Vegas is just over the mountains from us, and Tucumcari is way over by Texas.
I planted pansies in pots by the kitchen door and they don't mind the cold, but their nodding little faces are whipped about by the wind, making them look disheveled and the pots fill with fuzzy black aspen catkins, making them all look infested with caterpillars.
I wait indoors for the winds to die and for the soil to get warmer and for my plants to start showing up. Every day there is more green promise appearing, but I'll be waiting for a long windy while yet for much to happen.
I'm waiting for the cold to be over. It's fifty degrees and too windy to be outside comfortably. The garden is in all readiness, with green showing at soil level as plants wake up, and the tiniest of buds held tight in branches, and masses of giant catkins in the aspen trees.
I don't remember catkins last spring -- is this the result of our wet winter, while last year's winter was bone dry?
Fuzzy catkins sparkle in the sun and dangle like giant chandeliers all over the trees. They drop to the ground in big piles where they collect like a nest of woolly caterpillars. They blow in the door and come in the house on our shoes and scare me when I spot them on the floor. Eeek.
We've had a few nice sunny spring days where we could sit outside a bit. The cushions are back on the patio chairs. Tim our handyman comes next week to replace the burst outside faucet fixtures.
I hung the hummingbird feeder on the patio and another on the front portal, and it's another thing I'm waiting for -- some early scouts to visit.
But it's still cold, below freezing last night, with snow showers of maybe an inch predicted tomorrow night. Even on nice days we've had a lot of cloud cover.
The wind. Boy, does it get windy here in spring. And wind kicks up the dust. I don't know if your phone or monitor shows this National Weather Service graph large enough to see, but the red bars are the strongest mean winds, and Santa Fe's red bar (graph in the bottom left corner) is in April.
Las Vegas (NM, not Nevada) and Tucumcari are towns to the east of Santa Fe on the plains side of the mountains, and they get the strongest spring winds. Las Vegas is just over the mountains from us, and Tucumcari is way over by Texas.
I planted pansies in pots by the kitchen door and they don't mind the cold, but their nodding little faces are whipped about by the wind, making them look disheveled and the pots fill with fuzzy black aspen catkins, making them all look infested with caterpillars.
I wait indoors for the winds to die and for the soil to get warmer and for my plants to start showing up. Every day there is more green promise appearing, but I'll be waiting for a long windy while yet for much to happen.
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