And the winner is...

a lovely, little patch of snow bells. They are the first flowers to fully bloom and greet the spring.

Nora and I had a wonderful, sun-filled day yesterday.  I spent the morning pruning the small fruit trees and blueberry bushes, and turning our recently frozen compost piles.  Then, once it warmed up a bit, Nora joined me outside to give our older (and excessively overgrown) apple trees a much needed pruning.  That effort required some ladder and tree climbing and fancy angling with the large pulley pruner (the pulley pruner is a marvelous invention and everyone with sizeable fruit trees should have one), but we managed to prune out about 1/3 of the overgrowth.  Reshaping old fruit trees is a 3 year process, and we’re on year two.  To avoid injuring the tree, you should only remove 1/3 of the unwanted branches per year; slowly opening up the overgrown crown to allow more sunlight on the lower branches. 

After the pruning, I started cleaning up some of my numerous perennial beds.  We closed out the afternoon sitting on our back steps, soaking up the sun, chatting, and watching the various birds flit about.  Many of our summer birds have returned to the area – robins, mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds, starlings.  Thanks to Nora’s keenly observant eye, we also spotted several deer walking along the wood line on the far side of the pasture.  The day was topped off with a delicious dinner of beer-butt chicken slow roasted on the grill (I know it sounds very red-neck - although we used a Canadian lager rather than Bud - but it was remarkably tasty) and wild-grained rice.

A wonderful spring day to be sure.