The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Down Range Cafe => Topic started by: Big Frank on March 10, 2025, 03:19:00 PM
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The first sign of spring? DST - Daylight Stupid Time. Pretending it's a different time than it is for 2/3 of the year. Why not for the whole year? Or would that somehow defeat "the purpose" of it? How about none of the time , like 2/3 of the other countries in the world? I know everyone is tired of hearing it, but I'm still going to complain about it. Now Germany is only 5 hours ahead of Michigan instead of 6, but since I haven't made a transatlantic call in 41 years, it doesn't make any difference.
The second sign of spring? I have crocuses, or croci if you prefer, blooming in my back yard. It seems like they used to be bluer, but I'm brain damaged and partly colorblind, so I can't be sure. If the grape hyacinth in the front yard ever comes back again it will be bluer and a lot darker than this. This isn't the same variety of crocus that saffron comes from, but if it was you can be sure I wouldn't mow it down. At around 20 bucks a gram, that comes out to ~$9,000 a pound. I would proudly pick a pound of powdery pistils. ;D Wouldn't you like to retire on saffron money and enjoy the rest of your life?
The third sign of spring? Spring will be here in about a week and a half. It's already in the 60s, but technically speaking, winter isn't over yet. And this IS Michigan, so anything is possible. I won't be taking the snowplow off my ATV just yet. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocus
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My sister has become a master gardener, so now I get gentle reminders as to how we mispronounce some of the names. According to her.
Crow cue sis. accent on 2nd syllable.
It reminds me when medical "professionals" were pronouncing cm as Saw-nta Meter.
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:)
My ex's grandmother had Clematis, from Ancient Greek for "a climbing plant", covering a chain link fence. It seems like everyone else pronounces it CLEM-a-tis, but they pronounced it cle-MAH-tis. The "ma" in the middle makes it sound a lot like the abomination known as Clamato. :o One third of North America's supply of Clamato is used instead of tomato juice to make a worse version of a Bloody Mary cocktail called a Caesar. It's also used in a Mexican beer cocktail called michelada. And added to beer to make a beer 'n clam in Canada. Just thinking about those drinks makes me ill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clematis
P.S. A sign that spring isn't really here yet. It was in the 20s when I got up this morning! Brr. It probably won't get over 45 and it's going to rain.
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It's supposed to be a low of 57 degrees tonight, 30 tomorrow night, and in the 20s and low 30s for the remainder of a week. Here's another sign of spring, besides it getting up to 70 degrees again today. Tornado season is here. I got a text and email about this, plus the city tests the tornado sirens at 1 pm the first Saturday of every month during tornado season, about 3/4 of the year. I was sleeping and didn't hear it.
STATEWIDE TORNADO DRILL.
This is a test of the Genesee County 911 Weather Alert System.
Outdoor tornado sirens will begin their test at 1pm.
In coordination with the Genesee County Sheriffs Office Emergency Management, and the Michigan State Police, will be participating in a voluntary statewide tornado drill. Outdoor sirens will begin their test at 1pm, and RAVE emergency alerts will be sent to users enrolled in Tornado Alerts.
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When I worked downtown ATL a lot of guys, not me of course, thought the first true sign of spring was when they saw the first see-through blouse. A fashion thing back in those days.
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When the weather gets a bit nipply? :)
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I heard the Spring peepers the other night singing the love song of their people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwVEI5M-948&t=25s
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This is a quarter after 9 Monday morning at my friend's cabin and it's only 24 degrees. Brr. Somewhere in the picture may be a split-rail fence and steel gate but I don't see them. It doesn't look much like a driveway anyway. There are trees and big branches down on some of the cabins. There are so many trees and limbs down, the neighbor who lives at the corner of the lane couldn't even find the driveway from there to my friend's cabin. We had a severe thunderstorm here that I slept through, and they were warning about penny size hail. Or some coin smaller than a quarter. I read the warnings hours after it ended and deleted them. There were 60 mph winds and the storm was moving 70 mph. I guess the ice storm that hit 130 miles north of here was the same storm. I heard there were tornadoes too and someone died because of something falling on them or their car. I can't remember exactly what my friend's wife told me, but I guess they've been without power up there a couple of days already. The guy who lives at the end of the lane and plows it for everyone works for the power company. He said it could be another week before power is restored. So, my friend has to take time off work to get limbs off buildings and try to clean up what he can. He won't be able to drive to the cabin, but may be able to cut a path to get his ATV through. If the power isn't back on soon he's going to have to bring home a couple of turkeys and whatever else is in the freezer in the well house.
Meanwhile, I've had a butt-load of dark green foliage of star-of-Bethlehem in the back yard for over a week. I looked out the hall window upstairs and could see clumps of dark green among the hay colored grass. The leaves are like grass but darker green with a silvery color stripe down the middle like seen in this picture. It was 4-5" high when I looked at it a couple days ago. I haven't seen any flowers yet. Hopefully I'll get a pic of some before I have to mow. It's spring and winter at the same time.
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Pecan trees still ain't budding out yet......that's usually the sign in south GA.
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My tulips that I thought died are getting tall but don't have any flowers yet. I didn't see any daffodils, and they usually bloom and drop their flowers before the tulips bloom. I read somewhere a long time ago the word for daffodil used to be daffy-down-dilly. ???
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I forgot to post this earlier. It's part of an email from the power company, and an outage map from their site. Wind speeds of 74 mph and higher are hurricane force, and the wind was blowing up to 90 mph.
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I do have a daffodil growing with one of my tulips. Both bulbs must have been planted in the same hole. The high temps for the week starting today are 50s, 40s, 30s, 40s, and back in the 50s again. It averages 2 days in a row in each temperature range. Maybe if it stays in the 50s or higher the flowers will bloom. Not that they need it to be warm. These pics from March 22nd last year prove that. It's strange that they were blooming in the snow weeks earlier last year than they are this year with no snow. These are the same tulip and daffodil that are growing together this year.
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It took me awhile to locate the pics on my phone that my friend's wife sent me. It was some kind of Apple file I never heard of before. After I found it, I had to unzip all the pics and move them somewhere else. This is all from the ice storm a week ago.
I made a map of the place that is nowhere near scale and added a black line to each pic I could that shows where the driveway goes, as near as I can tell.
1. Map of camp.
2. Driveways, entering. Smurf Village is in front of the big tree between the gates.
3. Driveway, exiting.
4. Shortcut between properties. You can go from one to the other without going in and out of the gates.
5. Approaching end of driveway.
6. I just checked for outages and 99.5% of the people in Consumers Energy's area have power. The thumb and diagonal shaded parts are part of Detroit Edison's area.
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More pics.
1. Cabin 3.
2. Cabin 3 again.
3. Back of Cabin 3.
4. Well house at Y in driveway.
5. Cabin 2 at Y in driveway.
6. Cabin 1 and Garage at beginning of circle drive. The shower is at the back of the garage, fenced in with 3 panels of privacy fence. A garden hose runs all the way back to the well.
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Cabins 2 and 3 are storage sheds made by local Amish in Mio. My friends finished the insides with knotty pine boards just like the actual cabin and they look better than my house. Number 2 sometimes had an ATV stored inside when it wasn't in use.
1. Cook Tent and Kitchen Shed with wood pile under extended roof.
2. Side of Cabin with propane storage shed.
3. Looking back down driveway from the Y.
4. ;D
5. Screen grab from a game camera 9-1-24. Directly across the trail from my tent. If that buck is still alive he should be good eating size in November.
6. A night visitor at my friend's house. His wife thinks possums are adorable. I think she's nuts.
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For as long as I can remember the Cherokee Rose has been the State Flower of Georgia. There are attempts to demote it and actually to eradicate it from the state, because it's not indigenous. My view is that given a large enough span of history none of it is indigenous.
So being the ever rebel I am, I planted some of the bushes last year. My first blossom is just gorgeous.
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Nice. Didn't they grow along the Trail of Tears?
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The whole story is a fabrication. The Cherokee and Creeks had little or no known association with the alien plant. Some in modern times like to look on it as a symbol of defiance over the Trail of Tears hence the fairy tales. It was brought to the US in about 1780. It's not like Kudzu or anything but it is an aggressive species choking out other plants. Of course in my yard, I'll keep it trimmed to a respectable size and shape. I'll take extra precaution not to let any escape into the wild.
There is an organization devoted to stamping out non-native species. Don't know if they're just in GA or nationwide, but they're behind a movement to dethrone the rose as the state flower and replace it with.... BORING, the magnolia.
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I thought that was the story I heard. It sounded like a fairy tail to me.
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It hit 89° last week and will be in the 40's tomorrow...then back in the 80's by weekend....spring in south GA...sigh.
We went to the beach for a couple of days and when we came home the trees are all budding. Pecans bud and bloom quickly. A week from now the pollen will be killin' me and then the blooms will fall which makes a mess.
Late blooming coincides with late Easter this year as well.
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It's in the 30s here more days than not, if not for a high, then the low. It's only 34 right now and supposed to warm up ro 37 for a couple of hours before gets dark and colder again. :( Up to the mid-60s next week then cooling off again. It's a roller-coaster spring that feels like winter. Almost.
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Yesterday I had tulips and grape hyacinth blooming. The daffodils always bloomed and died back before the tulips bloomed, but not this year. They're just setting there doing nothing. I don't get it. A couple days before that, there wasn't even a grape hyacinth plant in the yard. The temp was in the 80s and BAM! It just appeared out of nowhere, flowers and all. Lots of white clover around it judging by the leaves, but it's green so I don't car. I was told today that they smell really good, but I never knew they even had a smell. Maybe tomorrow I'll crawl around and find out. CAFO! ;) I should have taken pics after I mowed today, but didn't. I mowed around it instead of over it this time. The star-of-Bethlehem in the back yard never bloomed and all got mowed down.
Same stuff, different year.
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I took some better pictures today. I took 3 of everything and picked one that was in focus and/or centered better than the other two. The grape hyacinth was really in focus in this one. I still haven't gotten down there to smell it. Some of my tulips on the south side of the porch are doing great, but the tulips and daffodils on the north side aren't ready yet. That's typical because they're in the shade all the time. But the daffodils should bloom weeks before the tulips, and none of them have. I noticed in the picture there's lamb's quarter, AKA fat-hen, goosefoot, or wild spinach growing in the bare dirt against the steps. I should harvest it when it's small and tender and eat it. I don't much care for the taste of raw spinach but have lots of salad dressing to make it taste better. I don't know what the heck is going on with the other tulips and daffodils, 10 feet or so from the tulips that are blooming. There are daffodils next to the tulips in the middle of the 4th pic.
Weeds. If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenopodium_album
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When I finally got around to attending college, I quickly learned that the first sign of spring was when the girls broke out the spandex. The second thing I learned was that all spandex should come with a weight and size limit. One size may fit all, but one size shouldn't fit all.
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thunderstorms today.
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When I finally got around to attending college, I quickly learned that the first sign of spring was when the girls broke out the spandex. The second thing I learned was that all spandex should come with a weight and size limit. One size may fit all, but one size shouldn't fit all.
Spandex is a privilege not a Right
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thunderstorms today.
Low 70s and 0 precipitation today. I was wearing a baseball cap outside getting my neck red while working in the driveway when I thought, I could use a sombrero. I have a Vortex Sun Slayer hat but didn't didn't stop working until the job was done. Half off, last call. I got the lighter of the 2 colors, and the L/XL just barely fits me. Not comfortably, but I can try stretching it out a bit.
https://vortexoptics.com/apparel-mens-sun-slayer-boonie-122-29+swatch_color-Morel
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Spandex is a privilege not a Right
It's a year-round thing way down here........the good, the bad & the ugly. 8)
It hit 90° here yesterday and I was grilling chicken all afternoon....sweating my a$$ off too (it grew back overnight). Carhartt shirts are thick and hold in the heat. I bet I drank a gallon of water and tea.
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It's a year-round thing way down here........the good, the bad & the ugly. 8)
It hit 90° here yesterday and I was grilling chicken all afternoon....sweating my a$$ off too (it grew back overnight). Carhartt shirts are thick and hold in the heat. I bet I drank a gallon of water and tea.
We have a family in church that causes me to shake my head. They have four girls - a college sophomore, twin high school seniors, and a sixteen year-old. These girls are all excellent and gifted athletes. volleyball and soccer consume all their spare time, and some time that should be spent on other things. These girls only clothing choice, except for an Easter dress, is spandex leggings. I have always questioned their clothing choice and it approprietness, but recently Mom has dedicated her wardrobe to spandex.
Spandex is like a mini skirt: If you wore it in high school, and your teenage daughters wear it, JUST SAY NO! Regardless of your fitness level, it just wasn't meant for you anymore.
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There are some things women wear, chokers, tube tops, mini-skirts, and bell bottoms just to name a few, that if they wore those things before when they were in style, they shouldn't wear them when they're in style again.
Guys like me don't have to worry about what we wear. The things I was forced to wear as a kid weren't in fashion then, and never will be. Even if they were, I now have a choice not to wear them. And I don't much care what I look like as long as I'm comfortable. Looking too attractive can be a curse, and dressing down is easier than dressing up.
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We have a family in church that causes me to shake my head. They have four girls - a college sophomore, twin high school seniors, and a sixteen year-old. These girls are all excellent and gifted athletes. volleyball and soccer consume all their spare time, and some time that should be spent on other things. These girls only clothing choice, except for an Easter dress, is spandex leggings. I have always questioned their clothing choice and it approprietness, but recently Mom has dedicated her wardrobe to spandex.
Spandex is like a mini skirt: If you wore it in high school, and your teenage daughters wear it, JUST SAY NO! Regardless of your fitness level, it just wasn't meant for you anymore.
How's this for inappropriate? When I was stationed in Germany, the Colonel had twin teenage daughters. The jail-bait twins both wore skin-tight jeans all the time. Someone asked one of them how they could get into jeans that were so incredibly tight, and you wouldn't believe her answer. They put their jeans on when they were soaking wet and stretchy enough to fit them. Then they dried them with hair dryers and they shrunk down skin tight! :o
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How's this for inappropriate? When I was stationed in Germany, the Colonel had twin teenage daughters. The jail-bait twins both wore skin-tight jeans all the time. Someone asked one of them how they could get into jeans that were so incredibly tight, and you wouldn't believe her answer. They put their jeans on when they were soaking wet and stretchy enough to fit them. Then they dried them with hair dryers and they shrunk down skin tight! :o
I heard that once as well.
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I heard that once as well.
It was a new one to me. There were a lot of sinful thoughts going around on post back then. I hope the girls enjoyed their good looks while they lasted, because beauty is a perishable commodity.
I had to mow my grass again and it was LONG. It didn't take long to get long. I finished it on one tank of gas but just barely.
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I had some Star-of-Bethlehem in my back yard yesterday. I mowed around it this time. It grew since the last time I mowed, a week or so ago. My daffodils never bloomed unless it happened when I wasn't looking. And neither did most of my tulips. I mowed them all down. Nothing left now but roses in 2 weeks, and daylilies. The map at Wikipedia says that Ornithogalum umbellatum, the garden star-of-Bethlehem, doesn't grow in Michigan. I suppose it could be a different kind of Ornithogalum. They're part of the asparagus family, which includes asparagus, yucca, bluebell, lily of the valley, and hosta, and the houseplants include snake plant, corn cane, spider plant, and plumosus fern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithogalum_umbellatum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithogalum
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Sign of spring: When it's finally warm enough for the fuzballs to start wanting their lap time sharing my bucket of walnuts in the porch chair again. This year Munch has decided he wants some too--last year he was more "climb leg, grab walnut out of bucket, skedaddle then come back for another" leaving the "sit, graze a little and snooze a bit" to the girls.
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We had a tornado watch and a severe thunderstorm warning Thursday. That sure sounds like spring to me. :D
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You know its spring here because the wind is blowing!
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Here too! Last evening the weather radio went nuts about dust storms. Dust storms in the burbs of Chicago? Sure enough, half an hour later the 40 mph winds swept through with dust so thick you couldn't see across the street.
By the way, welcome back to the nut house Red? I know it has been a tough time, but hopefully you can have some fun here.
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Rain today.
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Yesterday my friend said that now there's hail every time there's a thunderstorm. It didn't used to be that way, but now, I guess it's a hail of storm every time.
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Welcome back Red!
We've gotten rain and some bad winds with some hail lately. My 2018 F150 attests to the hail falling as does the crooked neck squash. 192,000 miles it's ok we're on track to get a crate engine some time this year...and a transmission at the same time. The rain has been great for the garden this year.
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My friends have a lot of plants growing in the greenhouse. I don't know if they'll plant before leaving for Memorial Day weekend, or wait until they get back. No one would be home to water them. They would have planted everything already, but when it's 80 degrees one day, and the temperature is supposed to drop down to 40 degrees the next night, they didn't think the time was right. They did plat a butt-load of flowers a couple of days ago. In another week, give or take a little, my "June roses" will be in full bloom.
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Since everyone's relatively healthy this year I planted a couple of dozen trees. Maybe a dozen apples, 1/2 a dozen of cherry along with nectarines, peaches. a pear or two and a couple of paw paws. That doesn't count 5 giant sequoia planted this year. We made up 350-400 feet of roadside with wildflowers, lavendar, marigold, some grapes and blueberries. There are 8 new hydrangea planted in the yard and across the road along with about a hundred gladiolas. I spaced out 4 Canna lillies along the fence and put in a 40' x 8' flower bed by the mailbox. That's not counting the flowerbed along the house, a 90' long tulip bed and a 10'x15' tulip bed up front by the driveway. It's been a busy time up here...
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Paw Paw, MI is 135 miles from Flint. One of my army friends lived there. The village is located at the confluence of the east and south branches of the Paw Paw River in the northeast portion of Paw Paw Township. Paw Paw is named for the pawpaw trees which once grew along the Paw Paw River. They grow wild SOMEWHERE in Michigan, but I've never seen one in my whole life. People who know where to find them don't tell anyone about them, so they can get all the pawpaws for themselves. It's North America’s largest native fruit, and I very much want to try them. I didn't know you could plant them yourself, but I don't want to wait 10 years or whatever it takes for a tree to mature. I don't have room for trees anyway.
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Bell Peppers and Jalapenos in the ground. Mouth is watering over the thought of having fresh Jalapenos for the summer.
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Paw Paw, MI is 135 miles from Flint. One of my army friends lived there. The village is located at the confluence of the east and south branches of the Paw Paw River in the northeast portion of Paw Paw Township. Paw Paw is named for the pawpaw trees which once grew along the Paw Paw River. They grow wild SOMEWHERE in Michigan, but I've never seen one in my whole life. People who know where to find them don't tell anyone about them, so they can get all the pawpaws for themselves. It's North America’s largest native fruit, and I very much want to try them. I didn't know you could plant them yourself, but I don't want to wait 10 years or whatever it takes for a tree to mature. I don't have room for trees anyway.
https://enjoyer.com/my-hunt-for-the-paw-paw-michigans-elusive-tropical-fruit/
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Thanks, Diamondback. Boone's Pawpaw Orchard is a 67 minute drive from my house. Google Maps has it listed as temporarily closed. He grows antique apples, cornel berries, and persimmons, too. I never heard of cornels, but they're a fruit in the dogwood family, and they look similar to coffee cherries when they're ripe. Nash Nurseries is only a 32 minute drive away. The city of Owosso is due west down the state highway I live 1/2 a block from. The nursery is about 10 miles south of downtown which is the only part of the city I'm slightly familiar with. They have a dozen different varieties of pawpaws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornus_mas
https://www.nashnurseries.com/index
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OL1K1hhBWg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbjxtvxAudo
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I have never seen a paw paw tree until I planted those. I heard about them as a kid from the "old folks" but the trees were no where to be found when I was growing up. I don't think they were that good or there would have been an effort to keep some around.
Regardless, I'm trying to get a couple of them going. I understand they are native around where I am and that they like to grow in the bottoms in a little shade.
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Bell Peppers and Jalapenos in the ground. Mouth is watering over the thought of having fresh Jalapenos for the summer.
We had some fresh jalapenos and banana peppers fried yesterday with fresh fish.
90°+ here and the garden is hitting full stride. Red taters and zucchini is rampant but no tomatoes or cucumbers quite yet.
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It looked like my roses weren't going to bloom until June this year, after several years of opening in the last 2 weeks of May. We had a lot of cold weather, but a few of them bloomed on the last day of May. Here they are yesterday at a quarter after 4 in the afternoon. I emailed the pic to my friend's wife yesterday and said my girls were looking pretty good this year. She texted back that her girls weren't looking so good. I texted back, "No comment.", with a big grin. :D I thought she was going to call me an a--hole or something, but she just sent her avatar making a funny face at me. :) I just mowed the front yard and lifted a bunch of roses up and set the branches on the chain-link fence so I could mow under them and see what I was doing. I lowered them back down when I was done. I managed to cut one off with the mower and set in on top of my mailbox for now. There seem to be a lot more today than yesterday when I took the pic.
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Only a few more days of spring left and we're already in the 90's every day with good rain the last few weeks.
The garden is booming.... watermelons are getting big, I had fresh cucumbers and cherry tomatoes in a salad yesterday and we canned the first batch of tomatoes today.
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There's a significant and dangerous heat wave this weekend through much of next week, but the severe thunderstorms today are keeping it from getting too hot so far. In other areas, there is a Critical Risk of fire weather over parts of the Great Basin/Four Corners today, and frost advisories and freeze warnings are in effect for parts northern California and northeastern Nevada respectively for tonight. Yeah, this wacky weather sure sounds like spring.
My roses in the front yard are almost done blooming. I thought they were going to be done at the beginning of the week but a few stragglers popped up. I'd like to deadhead the whole thing before I go up north for almost 3 weeks. It doesn't need to put its energy into making rose hips that I don't use. That energy would be better spent in the root system before I transplant a piece of it. I have a bunch of roses by the fence in the back yard. I should get a pic later today.
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It's 86 degrees but feels like 92 at 4:30 in the afternoon. I deadheaded 2/3 of my rosebush and cut everything off that was sticking over the fence in the neighbor's driveway. Whenever I finish, I have to bag up the bushes in a yard waste bag. It's not enough to fill the bag, so I'll save it until I cut some stuff out of the back fence. I took some pics of the roses in the back yard at 10 in the morning after it quit raining. There are some kind of lilies or daylilies in there too, but they haven't bloomed yet. There's a bunch of trees and vines growing through the fence all the time, so enough to fill a bag. There not much grass at the end of my lawn, but it's all green, so it's good enough. I mowed a bunch of white clover between the street and sidewalk the last time I mowed. That sucks, but it's green most of the time, and it's better than that *&^%$# chicory.
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Spring's over and summer's cookin' into triple digit heat index here.
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I'm diggin a few Irish potatoes now along with onions. Tomatoes are finally turning red...kinda late. The deer got into it.
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Spring's over and summer's cookin' into triple digit heat index here.
Yup. Same here.