I Love Spring

I just went outside this morning and started taking pictures. I truly love Spring...It's my favorite. There will be water issues this year, the opposite from last year, not enough. It's been such a mild and dry winter that I believe that there have only been two weeks this entire school year that I haven't ridden my bicycle to school at least once. I've ridden every day many weeks. In November I actually went 10 days without driving a motor vehicle.

Anyway, I'll talk about the pictures and then ramble on about other things, time permitting. I'm never sure how the pictures will appear order or location-wise when I post so I'll guess and hope the explanations match up.

The first picture is a shot from the driveway toward the southwest. The prune and peach blossoms don't show up very well, but you can see the blossoming half of the cherry tree. All of the grape plants survived the winter and the little vineyard that looks so barren now will soon be flush with foliage and perhaps an enormous crop of grapes in the late summer and fall.

The second and third pictures are of grape buds. the one with the fence is two cabernet savignoners from a vine that I planted three years ago from a dry root plant that was about 12" long from tip to root when I put it into the ground. It's so gratifying to see them grow and mature every season, the trunk getting rough and crustier, just like me, with age. The other one is a close-up shot of a pinot noir that I put into the ground yesterday. Looking at the picture, I'm thinking that I may need to replant. The graft needs to be closer to the ground. I imagine this vine is 2-3 years old. I'm taking a risk with these zone 7 varieties but the cab-savs have made it through the past three winters and 2010-2011 was a cold snowy one.

The next one is of Principessa (Princess) on one of her thrones, our wood pile. I'm not a cat fan for the most part, but she's gotten to me.

Finally, I am adding more vines along the fence where the goats used to be and putting all my bee hives back next to the goat shed. I lost 6 of 7 hives this past year and I'm thinking my last hive is not going to make it. I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm getting 5 new colonies in a few weeks. So I've been tearing down old fence and using the horse corral fence to support new vines. It will be some of the most expensive trellis out there but it's what I have, so it's free :-) the wagging tail in the bottom right corner is Nikki, except she's not a Husky.

I think that's it for now. I was just reading my last post, predictions and feelings about the primary elections and such, and I wa pretty close in my predictions about Romney and Santorum. Guess there are some advantages to having lived long enough to have observed a few things.