A Brief Taste of Spring.

4-15-18 SHORT HILLS: We were supposed to go to Vermont today for the week, but several friends said don’t come up because the weather’s delivering ice and snow. I wonder if they would have had a different excuse if the weather were OK. It’s pretty nasty here today with temps in the thirties, overcast sky, gusty wind and rain expected later.

So we stayed in NJ, and I painted the windows in the sunroom that had been damaged by the leak in the roof, and that I had repaired a few weeks ago. I had replaced a few pieces of rotten wood with Azek.

The last few days have been gorgeous, sunny and in the eighties, and we thought spring had finally arrived. I was outside continuing to do the clean up all day. Frank’s Tree was here and pulled all the big hangers out of the trees, virtually every tree had broken branches. They chipped it all and took it away. Actually I found more deadfall after they left and added that to the street pile.

We also had them cut down the sickly Japanese maple. It had been one of my favorites, but had become just a dying remnant of its old self.

GM Fence was here also to give us an estimate for repair to the storm damage and replace rotted posts and rails. Their visit is almost a yearly event.

Yesterday I did the first fertilizing, Holly-tone for the acidophiles and regular 10-10-10 for all the others. I also gave the grass granular lime. I used some lime on the alkali lovers, lilacs, forsythia and columbine.

New blooms: pussy willow, spicebush, pachysandra, daffodil.


First daffodil.

Pussy willow flowers, the leaf buds are just starting to open.

Pachysandra flower easy to overlook, but it's interesting if you take a close look.

Forsythia leads the yellow parade of spring. Behind the forsythia on the left is another shrub with yellow flowers, spicebush.

Spicebush close-up. Spicebush, forsythia, pachysandra, pussy willow and andromeda all open the flowers before the new leaves.