Could there be peaches?

The last two years my peach tree has offered only a sparse set of hopes. The last two years raccoons and squirrels have dashed those hopes to the ground. This year, lots of plump little peaches are possibilities wrapped in pink blushing plushness. Question is, will I stop admiring them long enough to put a […]

Raspberries are coming

First sign of color from the raspberries. Soon the deluge will begin.

Hungry, hungry birdies

For a while, in early spring, it took so long for the feeders to empty, I was starting to wonder where the birds were. Even as more birds appeared and sang, the feeders still seemed neglected. I think maybe they were finding plenty of forage and bugs to feed their babies, which would be good, […]

One Coneflower today, more soon

Coneflowers belong to hot summer days and lots of bumblebees. Not to grey rainy skies. And the bees are hard to please, and they prefer the raspberries. So this lone coneflower is the vanguard, scouting things out for when it’s safe for the rest of them to fully bloom.

Strawberry season

There’s two races when picking strawberries. One is to get them before they go mushy. The other is to get them before the slugs do.

Mock orange v. forsythia

The mock orange is picking up where the peonies left off. Such a nice plant, covered with four-petalled white flowers and smelling sweet on sunny days. (Or at least in the few hours of sun between thunderstorms.) The poor thing was so smothered by that ugly pile of forsythia, when I first noticed it, there […]

Peo-not

It’s not exactly comforting to make it home after getting caught in a frog-drowner, only to hear the weather guy on the radio saying this was nothing like the tornado-spawning storms of last week. Just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill severe thunderstorm.

Fledgling chickadees

This afternoon I heard a faint peeping high in the yew bushes. I looked up and just made out two little grey balls of fluff sitting on the boughs. Fledglings. Every few minutes a grown-up chickadee would zoom in and the fledglings would call out and flutter their wings, begging for dinner. In a few […]

Can there be too many peaches?

My big project for today was to go out in the yard and play. First I admired how much bigger the pears and apples are already. Then I took one last look at the amazing number of little peaches on the peach tree. I learned last year from the plum tree, that if I don’t […]

A strangeness of peonies

For all the talk of crazy weather, what’s been going on isn’t as odd as you might think. Snowy winter with drifts that last into May? It happens. Wet, cold spring? Totally normal. Massive thunderstorms, both scary and awesome? Seen a few. Killer tornadoes in Massachusetts? Rare, but this is exactly when they strike. But […]