Happy spring! (morning writing)

[elainegrey]

The small multi-flowered yellow narcissus are still blooming, while the later narcissus in pale butter yellow and white haven't started yet. It has not been a good spring for daffodils -- yet? It's finally time for the native flowers: violets are rioting, the red buds are beginning to shimmer with color. One red bud i had transplanted some years ago on the south berm has blossoms. The volunteer at the other end of the berm seems strangely inert. The surviving dogwoods are opening their white bracts to the sky. I've lost some creeping phlox to a combination of weeds and drought. The spice bush blooms seem to have been lost this year, overwhelmed by the grey-green leaf-out of the invasive autumn olive and possibly their own leaves. The Chickasaw plum had so many flower buds, but i think rain and freezing weather limited the show. A juneberry in the woods by the driveway has a few high blossoms. The one i have planted still waits for the right time: perhaps it still needs a few years.

We have been in "severe" drought since January, the longest since we moved here, and the most severe since a terrible "exceptional" drought in 2007-2008. (None of this like California drought, which was "exceptional" from 2014 to the end of 2016.) No indication of any frost chance for the next ten days, barely any rain.  I've probably wasted all the money i have spent on grass seed.

It was overcast last night so i missed the moon-Venus conjunction and any chance of dim aurora.

I am intending to see some family at lunch today, and to dig and assemble my new raised beds. I hope to get the complicated parts -- assembly, leveling the site, trenching the French drain and adding coarse gravel, a screen, and finer gravel mostly done this weekend. Then i think smaller efforts trundling fill from various sites will be easier.

The Thomasville citrangequat has been ordered; tabs open for two pineapple guavas and a yuzu. I've ordered seeds of goat's rue (Tephrosia virginiana), a native legume with showy flowers, as a nitrogen fixing cover crop. I am imagining adding a few artichokes to act as a cover, too, until the trees fill in. Maybe a lavender.

My performance at work this week was not good, much frittering, and that needs to pull around.