Another Early Spring

It's another early Spring here, and my heart goes out to all the people living in blizzard country.

We set records in February for heat... 5 days of 80 ° +.  The previous record was like 2 days....  3 of those days of 80+  broke all-time records... definitely global warming here...

 Honey bee 

and cabbage butterfly... saw a tiger swallowtail this morning... followed it around with camera, and it refused to hold still. 

 Bloodroot and buckeye

 Gray tree frog in the wall of my house.

Goldfish sunning themselves

 Check this clutch of eggs!

They burst open to become these anemone stinkhorns. (Aseroe rubra)

 Carolina jessemine and Chinese wisteria

 Not sure what the towhee was complaining about on a beautiful Spring day...

The gopher tortoise is doing some spring house cleaning.

Sandhill cranes flying....  13 seconds of video of their calls.

 Flowers on the hardy orange.

 Tomato seedlings that the cats planted...

 Cat inspecting the spinach...

The poppies are fat and happy.

The hellebore are peaking.

There are so many trees in bloom, will post this redbud... and not post the peaches, pears, cherry and whatever else...

Just to show that I had them... The daffodil are pretty much finished....

Snow Day

It started snowing early.... First snow since 2014....

The cats weren't too sure about that white stuff at first...

 This towhee doesn't seem to mind...

 Cardinal seems happy to eat snow covered chenopodium seeds...

 

And these cuties seem happy with the white stuff as well. 

Blue jay and brown thrasher

Snow on the camellia bush.

Goldenrod

 Hellebore and holly

 Mahonia

Apparently.... Governor Deal declared a state of emergency due to us getting an inch of snow....

I saw video of the interstate traffic on the news this morning... looked like a still shot... glad I wasn't out there!

bombogenesis

Glad I've been to have escaped the snow and extreme freezing conditions.... and yet.... the low 20s and high teens that we've been experiencing as lows have been rough enough...

Some beauty in the garden as a result of the cold, though...

Frost flowers!

 Winter seedpods are always attractive.... Round-headed Bush Clover (Lespedeza capitata) above and bluestem below.

 Camellia before the deepfreeze... they're brown now...

 Loquat tree... flower before the freeze... also brown now...

 Cyclamon and hellebore, neither are bothered by the cold...

Mustard greens after the deep freeze... doesn't look real appetizing now...

 Greens before the freeze.... Also.... pickup full of horse poop.

Poop.... each hump represents a truckload brought in.... I'm finding that dumping it out in piles allows it to loosen the sand, and importantly to kill the japanese honeysuckle and muscadine grape vines... those vines can be problematic when working on a new section of vegetable garden.

here's a section of the vegetable garden... maybe a quarter of  the whole....

another picture of frostflower... richardia.

Fuse box full of wasps....

seeing a lot of songbird activity with the new rising temps....