The Trees Know What Time It Is.

3-2-11 SHORT HILLS: We are 99% snow free, not counting the piles in the driveway. It took a couple warmish days and some rain. Now we have mud and sticks. All those wind storms left the yard covered with sticks, branches, limbs, twigs and wood chips and chunks where the spruce trees came down. Today started out as sunny, but is now overcast and windy with a freeze predicted for tonight.

I counted rings on the spruce stumps. The smaller one, 18 inches in diameter, had about 75 rings. The larger stump was almost three feet in diameter. The rings were harder to read because the stump was split in several places, all opposite from the wind direction, but there were probably not a whole lot more than about 80 rings. The center 3 inches was rotted. The outer most rings were a half inch in thickness.

I have started clean-up, pulling broken branches out of the shrubs and breaking up the big pieces for mulch.

The tops of the elm tree, birches and maples are showing a little orange or reddish color and the buds are swelling. Daffodil and crocus shoots are visible.

New blooms: more snowdrops.


The top of a red maple, the red doesn't show, but the buds are busy.

The top of our elm, seen through other trees, those fat blobs are the elm buds. They'll be open a week.