a man and his hoe

Spring unfolds slowly in the Pacific Northwest, which means there is more time for spring surprises. It should be no surprise that daffodils bloom in spring. Yet when they do it’s always a pleasant surprise.

A friend raises alpacas and she’s generously shared alpaca beans with me. They’re great for enriching the garden soil. Unlike many other types of animal droppings, you can use them directly without composting them. Their low nitrogen level won’t burn plants. Neither do alpaca beans contain weed seeds.

I spread some alpaca beans around some flowers and was surprised to discover that the dogs thought I had liberally spread dog treats all around just for them. They had a feast.

So if you raise alpacas and wonder what to do with all their droppings, try drying them out and giving them to your dog loving friends as dog treats. Put them in pretty bags and don’t tell your friends what they are until they beg you for the recipe. Your friends might disdain you, but their dogs will love you forever.

The sign says “No Parking” but the snow geese pay no attention. Huge flocks of snow geese covered pastures in the north Skagit River delta today. A few more weeks and they will be off, on their way to the Arctic.

There should be more sunny days, so when they come along, they are a pleasant spring surprise. It’s the beginning of potato planting season. Seeing their first leaves poke out of the ground is always one of spring’s pleasant surprises.

All is not lost because stinging nettles are popping out of the ground. Spring is here for good. Omelettes and souflés with stinging nettles, stinging nettle soup, stinging nettle chowder, potatoes with stinging nettles, for a month or two, we’ll enjoy the taste of spring.

All is not lost because the crocus by the Horse Chestnut are in bloom. Each year they pop up at the cusp of winter and spring. And each year there are a few more.

The Horse Chestnut puts on a display of showy flowers too, later in the spring. According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health:

Historically, horse chestnut seed extract was used for joint pain, bladder and gastrointestinal problems, fever, leg cramps, and other conditions. Today, horse chestnut seed extract is promoted for chronic venous insufficiency (CVI; poor blood flow in the veins of the legs, which may lead to leg pain, swelling, itchiness, and other symptoms), irritable bowel syndrome, male infertility, and other conditions.

A 2012 systematic review of 17 studies suggested that horse chestnut seed extract can improve symptoms of CVI. Results from one of these studies suggested that horse chestnut seed extract may be as effective as wearing compression stockings.

Makes me ponder about collecting some Horse Chestnut seeds and making an extract for my joints. However they contain a toxic substance. So you have to remove it before you can use them.

All is not lost because the cherry blossom buds are swelling. Each day they swell a bit more. Watching them plump up until they pop open makes spring a delight.

Wednesday night into Thursday morning, a snow so light fell that if it had been any lighter it would not have drifted to the ground. It would have floated in the air and blown away.

Thursday morning, the clouds that brought the snow vanished. The bluest of blues filled the skies.

In the fall I don’t cut down the dried flower heads. I leave them just so they can collect the finest of snows on days like these. The flower heads are mostly air with thin, fragile branches holding up dried flower buds. But somehow the finest of snows manages to build bridges between these thin branches and form billowy nests. Snow so fine should just slip between the thin branches and flutter to the ground.

See how far apart the individual flower buds are? They are further apart than the flakes are big. Yet a few flakes cling to the buds, more flakes cling to the edges of those flakes, and being so light they hang on, until enough flakes cling to their edges and to the new edges, and snowflake bridges span from bud to bud.

The snow is so light, that it’s conceivable it could lift the branches it falls on. Luckily for us, snow melts into water. If it melted into a clingy gas, it could conceivably pull the plants out of the ground and carry them high into the sky. If that were the case, we’d be out smacking the snow off plants to keep them from flying away when the snow changed to clingy gas and carried them over the mountains.

Today’s rain and warm weather melted all the snow. Thursday’s snow is but a memory. The plants and trees did not float away with the snow.

Was this the last snow of the season? It’s almost March. With each day, the chance of another snow diminishes.

One day swans are feeding on pastures on a warm February day and daffodils are opening, but change is in the air.

The next day we wake up to a white, winter wonderland. From spring to winter over night.

It’s a beautiful sight, though the snow is like white concrete. It brought down power lines and we had no power for much of the day. It’s very quiet without the power on. We’ve moved on from using gas powered generators to a backup battery that can keep essential appliances functioning for twenty four hours. No more purring of a gas powered generator, no more checking to see if we need to add gasoline to the generator. And we can keep the battery in the house. Change is in the air.

A surprise was finding shards of ice forming inside a watering can this morning. Is this how ice forms inside a can? Spears of ice shooting from the outside in? What happens when the spears meet in the center? Do these ice spears have a name? Have scientists studied this phenomenon? Looks to me like there could be a Phd dissertation here. See how in the upper right ice is forming like snowflakes, but in the middle it’s forming spears. Something different is happening even though there is very little space between them. How many pages would it take describe why that is?

Not a day goes by without me seeing something that makes me wonder how that works or why it is.

One unexpected change today was discovering that I may be forced to put my tofu making on hold. I placed an order for more organic soybeans but my current supplier told me that they are out of stock. I’ve been dreading this might happen one of these days. My first supplier, Grain Place Foods, ran out many months ago. Since then I’ve been getting 25 pound bags of organic soybeans from the Skagit Valley Food Co-op. Even though the bags they get are Grain Place Foods soybeans. But now the Co-op’s supplier has run out too. According to Grain Place Foods:

As is always the case in the world of agriculture, we are at the mercy of “Mother Nature” when it comes to meteorological instances and weather trends throughout the country. This year, severe droughts in multiple states threaten to limit the availability of raw products. Many farmers who grow crops for us have called to say that their fields have basically “burnt up” and they will have little to no harvest to speak of.

So once my current supply of soybeans are gone, there will be no tofu for a while. Sorry to those of you who enjoy my tofu.

Flower away hazelnut! Some trees go all out when it comes to flowering. Hazelnuts are early bloomers. On this warm, sunny, spring day, they have outdone themselves. How many thousands of blossoms are on a single hazelnut tree? Tens of thousands? Over a hundred thousand?

And one lucky hover fly has the whole tree to itself.

Is that a bee? In mid February? That was my first thought seeing a fuzzy bundle feasting on the hazelnut blossoms. But no, it turned out to be a hover fly instead. A tell tale sign is it only has a single pair of wings. No bee would be caught dead without a full set of two wings.

If you are an insect who loves flowers, it pays to get out early in the season so you can have a whole hazelnut tree to yourself.

Shake a hazelnut tree which is in bloom and a cloud of pollen dust fills the air. But sadly, if you get hay fever from hazelnut pollen, you may be allergic to hazelnuts. That would be a bummer.

Underneath the hazelnuts, an artichoke has sprouted. I’m thinking this may have sprouted from seed. When artichokes bud, I always let some bloom for the wonderful, purple flowers. There are substantial sprouts where artichokes grew last year. But this minuscule artichoke sprouted where no artichoke grew last year.

It’s only February, but already I’m dreaming of summer days with arms full of heavy artichokes plucked out of the garden.