It comes

[greenstorm]

This weekend was down to -14C, but the winter's teeth are gone. My woodstove wants to take 18-20 hours to cycle instead of 12. It's 22-25C in the house pretty much all the time. And two days ago was the first time I did chores in 2020 without a shirt (I left my scarf on, my neck has a crick in it, but still).

I celebrated by separating some more African violet pups: Neon Halo, Smooch Me, Tina's April Fantasy, Wizard's Shadowed Lady, Suncoast Paisley Print. They've joined my Izhum, Amulet, Splatter Kake, Afrykanskaia Noch, and Reka Scrverka in real pots. Only 50 or so more tiny pots to go (and of those, honestly, only another ten or twelve are ready to separate). I've been taking them to work and lining them up on the windowsill.

Birds are laying and it just feels good out. I put out a couple nests for the geese; Thea started sleeping in one and the chickens laying in the other. Oh well.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

beautiful!

it feels like spring here, too. winter jasmine, always the first flower, is blooming, and fruit trees are thinking about budding. we'll certainly get a couple more serious cold snaps, but winter's definitely on the way out. so are the sandhill cranes who overwinter here; they started heading out two weeks ago and only a few are left now. their movements feel like an accurate way to predict the weather, to me. the birds know.

[greenstorm]

Oh, I wonder if it's your cranes that come up here in the spring? There were some across the road last year, they're so loud but the keep away from my geese. And we get an inundation of swans just as the snow leaves the ground; they move along the edge of the snow, gleaning grain from the freshly-revealed ground. They are my favourite.

Is your winter jasmine the one with small yellow flowers on naked green twigs? As a gardener I hate common names; as the speaker of a language I love them.

We do still have 2' of snow and more will fall yet, but things are moving.

[yarrowkat]

your cranes might be our cranes! they go north through Colorado and then I don't know where. Montana, Canada. I don't know if they fly directly north, or veer east/west; I do know they winter everywhere down here and well into northern Mexico, following the waterways. They like the summer-irrigated fields; they pick the bits of grain and seeds and bugs out of the stubbled fields. we get Canada geese, snow geese, and Ross's geese by the thousands here in the winter too, and ducks. some of the geese and ducks are year-round; many come in November and leave around now. i have never seen a swan in the wild! only in zoos and botanical gardens and such.

yes, winter jasmine is yellow 5-petalled flowers on bare twigs; the buds are bright red. i see people mistake it for forsythia all the time but it has a completely different growth habit - it tends to mound, doesn't get more than 4' tall and not usually that high (here), and is totally unremarkable when it's not blooming, where forsythia will get 12' tall and absolutely sprawling, though it responds well to pruning. jasminium nudiflorum, says google.

[greenstorm]

Oh neat, I think your cranes and our swans move together with overlap at the swans' more southerly and the cranes' more northerly edge of the range.

Trumpeter swans, like Canada geese, are one of those migratory hordes that was once nearly extinct before international laws were put in place. It's hard to believe now. Many of them overwinter on the rivers here: the moving water keeps ice from forming and they eat the river plants. They are so lovely.

I know the jasmine you're talking about, it mostly cascades on the coast as a kind of floppy shrub. It's not one of the select few that survives up here, alas.

I know there are crocus starting on the coast, and I bet the hazels are flowering. Also the early vacciniums and the sarcococca, which I can never spell and no one ever notices. Someday I'll know this ecosystem as well as I do that one.

[yarrowkat]

have you seen those maps of bird migrations across the Americas? this one is incomplete but easy to read: https://twitter.com/amazing_maps/status/829487631671103488?lang=en

this range map suggests that the cranes actually go all the way to the northernmost parts of Canada in summer! it skips New Mexico - everybody skips New Mexico - but I promise our fields are full of cranes, from that blue circle (in the San Luis Valley in Southern Colorado - which is the northern part of the Rio Grande), all the way down the Rio Grande, every winter - https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Sandhill_Crane/maps-range

i think of birds as messengers, birds as a kind of ecological communication between diverse places, birds as epistles. the cranes from my neighborhood talking to the swans from yours.

"floppy" is a great word for winter jasmine. it's pretty now, but it's so dull the rest of the year, and incredibly nondescript. we have some in the front of our community building that we did not plant and have been unsucessful at eradicating. it's as disorganized as a weed. :)

my bulbs are all coming up, but none quite in flower yet! soon. daffodils will go in the next week, and crocus, then grape hyacinths. iris leaves are spearing up, though they won't bloom for another month or so, after the quince & forsythia.