Each year I keep planting more tulips. You can’t have too many tulips, can you? When you have free roaming chickens, you need two to three times as many tulips because they like nibbling on tulips when they start pushing out of the ground. They like nibbling on the blossoms too.

I love the forest floor this time of year. It is green with false lily-of-the-valley and bleeding hearts. I lived once in a desert and learned that I can’t live where it’s not green and moist. Every day, just a few steps away from my front door, the forest beckons. This time of year, tread lightly through it’s soft floor, and it blesses with delicate bleeding hearts. Soon the white trilliums and false lily-of-the-valley will bloom. Being creatures of the woods, one reason deer have such slender, delicate feet, is so they don’t disturb the forest floor and trample on the bleeding hearts.

You never hear people say, “I can’t wait for the maples to bloom.” I never thought much about blooming maples either, until I saw these scarlet blossoms on a Japanese maple. They’re rather stunning. They’re as pretty as the cherry blossoms.

Maple trees have a wide variety of flowers: Maple Flowers – www.maplesociety.org.

The chickens this afternoon are as colorful as any flower. They come in such an array of colors, they should be called Dazzle Birds.

The greens this time of year have so much flavor, adding dressing would desecrate them. After going through a winter, the kale is tender and sweet. The ruby streaks are so mustardy, they clear your nose. When you eat an apple, or orange, or banana, you don’t think of adding any dressing. When salad greens taste this good, the thought of putting something on them doesn’t even come up.

Oooo! What is that? This is why walking in the woods is important. You get to see the alien life forms that live among us.

I guess this is what happens when all you eat is wood. You turn into this spaceship looking thing that makes a passersby say, “Oooo! What is that?”

If it’s gone tomorrow, it’s probably flown off somewhere, right? Flown off to another solar system to colonize another forest?