For anybody who says climate change doesn’t exist, or, worse yet, that it doesn’t matter, you should have seen me the last 2 days working in the garden, at 65 degrees, here in south central PA.  Last year at this time we had just dug out from about 8″ of snow a couple weeks before.

Most of my herbs are up or coming back:  parsley, chives, thyme, oregano.

I guess I should now mention Wilbur, our ground hog who lives in a subterranean apartment under my garage.  Last year he wrote a blog ( 🙂 ) and since then I’ve called this one herb Wilbur’s Parsley. https://sarasinart.net/2016/11/26/wilbur-wrote-a-blog/

I haven’t seen him yet this year and we’ve had quite a bit of warm weather, much warmer than any February.  Maybe he’s a late sleeper, or maybe he moved on.  I doubt that tho cos he took great effort to dig his hole good and deep last fall, near where tomatoes and some small melons tasted so sweet to him, and then of course, there’s parsley.

The herbs will be ok if our winter comes back.  But with the weather the way it is, who knows if it will?  Strange weather all over, and we have no clue what to expect from our summer, our short growing season.

We only had a couple small snows and not a lot of rain.  We were already in a drought watch in this area last fall.  Now there is no way to know what our water situation will be in the summer.  Maybe we’ll have the usual spring rains, and maybe that will be enough to replenish our reservoirs.

The little crocus are already up.  That’s about two weeks earlier than usual, and these are always awake and alive long before anything else here.  I wrote a blog about them last year on 3/9. https://sarasinart.net/2013/03/09/the-crocus-survived-the-snow/

Crocus being up and herbs coming alive are ok.  But there are buds on 2 maple trees, and all my roses, and it’s too early for any of that.  Those things will not take a freeze.  And I would guess that since those things are shooting buds, so are all the fruit trees around here.  A freeze now will nip a lot of things and if the fruit trees get it, the crops could be lost.

So I’m enjoying, and taking advantage of, these warm days, to get an early start cleaning up the garden areas.  But it’s ominous, what lies ahead, in the strangest spring I’ve seen in these 60 + years.