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One thing about March is that you never know what the weather is going to be like. It can be Winter one day and Spring the next. Sometimes you can have both Winter and Spring on the same day. The photo above, which I captured a few years ago does a pretty good job of capturing both seasons in one picture — ice covered branches against a beautiful blue sky.
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My Beautiful Bride was very excited when we woke up yesterday morning — there was snow on the ground and it was still snowing.
Seeing the snow on the buses just made her more excited. This was just the type of snowfall that she loves.
Betsy must have taken a couple hundred pictures during the day. Her excitement was infectious — she had me singing/humming “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” most of the day.
The snow continued all day and more and more fell on the bushes.
It continued snowing even as night fell. According to the news, we got approximately 8 inches of snow. Betsy was still ecstatic, and I still had that song running through my head!
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We used to get some fairly decent snowfalls when we first moved to Fairfield Glade, but in recent years we’ve gotten more ice and frost instead of snow. But even an icy golf course pond can be beautiful on a bright January morning, as this picture shows. I like the reflection as well as the frost covered grasses on the edge of the pond.
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My Beautiful Bride loves snow (me not so much!) — she can hardly wait to get outside when it’s snowing. Unfortunately we haven’t had much snow here in Fairfield Glade over the past few years. but Betsy is hoping that changes this year.
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We had to transplant some of our iris this past spring as part of our (unsuccessful) effort to keep the deer out of our roses. As a result, some of them didn’t bloom during their normal blooming season. But Victoria Falls, a beautiful blue iris, decided to bloom in late October. I hope she is saying that she approves of her new location.
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We’ve had to move new roses from the yard to containers on the deck to keep them out of reach of hungry deer. I haven’t had much experience growing roses in containers, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But Pink Parfait rewarded us with a late October blossom, so I’m hoping we can keep some roses alive.
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Since we have had many more visits from deer into our yard over the past couple of years, we’ve had to shift many of our roses from the bed in front to containers on our deck. (So far the deer haven’t climbed onto the deck in search of their snacks!) Fortunately, the roses seem to be doing fairly well in their containers. This is Color Magic, one of our favorites.
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I happen to think that roses are beautiful, but there is something about water droplets on the blossoms that makes them even more appealing. This is Elle in a picture taken after a shower last year.
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I’m guessing that the dark colors are responsible for the name of this iris — Hellfire. But in spite of the name, I think this is a beautiful iris, especially when the sun hits it just right. We’ve had this in our yard for several years now, and we always look forward to seeing it bloom.
This is probably the most frustrating year we’ve had for growing roses since we moved here 20 years ago. In addition to the weather — extremely high temperatures, too little rain, too much rain — we’ve had continuing problems with the deer that live in our area (where they are protected).
Deer seem to think that roses make delicious meals and they wiped out every bud on the plants in our yard twice this Spring. The things we used to keep them away in the past (Liquid Fence and other repellents) didn’t phase the hungry critters at all. We were able to move some container roses onto the deck where the deer didn’t bother them, but the roses in the yard were one big buffet table.
In desperation we connected a garden hose to a motion detector and turned it on each evening, leaving it on until morning. Once we saw a young deer walk into a flower bed; the detector picked him up, the water came on, and the deer beat a hasty retreat. We’ve also seen deer making a wide detour away from our yard, which is fine with us.
We finally have some roses in the yard in bloom! An added bonus to this method of deterrence is that the roses often have water droplets on them, like the droplets on Wildfire in the picture above.
It’s so nice to have roses in bloom!
Senior Moments 