The roses and irises are all starting to bloom, and the yard is just full of pretty flowers of all colors this year ! My peony is also blossoming. It is only the single peony and not the magnificent double ones that my mom had, but still pretty.
Look up how to eat milkweed, if the monarch don't need it. The cooking is the important part. You can eat the young plants like asparagus, the buds, the young pods. My daughter loves them but we do have butterflies.
My daffodils are half done. I put in a lot of crocus last fall. The ones around my barn made me happy with all the color, this spring. The ones I put in front of the house were pretty too, but a rabbit took them out.
Everything still covered with snow, although I put the snowmobile to bed yesterday. We still can't get into the orchards to do dormant pruning. A friend in Minnesota sent a photo of her asparagus harvest and we sent back a picture of our bed with a foot or more of snow on it. Minnesotans (and sometimes Maine folks) are always telling us that their winters are as cold as ours. Some parts of Minnesota are as cold as some parts of Alaska, but, having lived in both states, I can categorically state that no place is Minnesota is as cold as the coldest parts of Alaska, and Minnesota winters are not nearly as long as the winter in most of Alaska. I just read about a storm on Denali (Mt. McKinley then) in 1967 had an estimated 300mph winds at -40 F./C. The climbers on the mountains were mostly killed at that time. No weather station up there, so we can't compare it to Mt. Washington, but really....
. Show off! I definitely would not be able to make it in Alaska. A friend of mine moved up to Anchorage to live with her daughter and I only heard back from her once and I didn't have her phone number. I hope she didn't freeze to death. She was 83. But weather here is changing even without global warming. The winds are HUGE and a lot of trees are coming down. I had another older willow fall into the pond and I am not sure how I will get it out. That super heavy snow storm broke a lot of limbs off around the house and subdivision. They are cut up along the road to make it passable while people are figuring what to do. Not everyone uses firewood anymore.
Moving to Alaska...even to Anchorage which is close to Alaska...is very difficult at any age, but especially if you are over 60. The winters are long and dark, but the summers are almost non-stop light, so during the winter you don't wan to get out of bed, and in the summer you don't wan to go to bed or can't sleep if you do. That is a standard joke in Alaska. The only thing good about Anchorage is that it is close to Alaska We have non-stop traffic here on weekends as the Anchoragites escape from Anchorage to Alaska.
I ordered some iris seeds from Amazon. I have never tried growing an iris from seeds, but it was supposed to be a variety of heirloom irises, so it would give me more colors than I have now. Then, I watched some YT videos on growing iris from seeds, and realized that mine have probably been producing seeds along along, except I always cut off the blossom stem right after they were done blooming, so I never got any seed pods. This year, I am going to leave them after they are all done blooming and then just remove any that do not have seed pods. This fall, I can harvest the seed pods, and that should produce more colors for me, since the bees will have inter-pollinated the different colors that I have right now. This is the picture from the seeds I ordered from Amazon.
Today I terminated the yellow squash and zucchini plants. I put several bags of squash in the freezer and we are tired of it already. My tomato plants are loaded with several kinds of green tomatoes... Celebrity, Bella Rosa, and Cherokee Purple slicers plus a few cherry tomato plants that I moved outside from the Aerogardens.