Bea & Fox et al come for a visit

Bea and Fox came for a visit in February. (Oh yeah, they brought their parents too) Unfortunately, Annie and I got a bad case of the flu a few days after they arrived and missed great chunks of their visit. The cold weather we had in late January - early February departed, so they had nice weather while here. Bea even tried out the wading pool.

Our yard is full of goatheads, little seed pods with very sharp spikes all over, so Bea had to be very careful around the pool. Fox enjoyed splashing around on the porch ..

We haven't had a frost for about a week now, although it's possible for temps to get down to freezing at night into April. We have stuff greening up, however, and bushes, shrubs and trees are beginning to leaf out. Our newly planted plumb tree has lots of buds, as do several unidentified bushes in the back yard. I finally got a back deck built and put up a pully clothes line by the back door so Annie can finally hang out the wash, something she has missed for the past few months.

Our greenhouse is holding up to the spring winds and we have lettuce, pak choy, beets and chard that are all doing famously. Some we'll leave inside and some we'll transplant outside soon. We bought a fan palm and planted it out front last week. Always wanted a palm tree in my yard, now I've got one. Took a drive into the desert yesterday and got several bags of cow manure. (It's just laying around waiting for someone to pick it up, kind of like the coal on Bishop's Beach) Ive been soaking it to make manure tea for the garden and adding it to our compost. I've got a couple of great compost bins going that are really heating up and we should have finished compost in a month.

Even though we haven't had a drop of rain since last September, there are little shoots of grass coming up in the yard and our neighbor's apricot tree is in bloom. And it's not even St. Paddy's day yet!