I should really take some pictures, but just to jot down some updates after spending an unusually sunny day outside today:

• The mason bees are starting to hatch. One literally popped the seal off his tube while I was watching today. How a little critter like that can flick a chunk of mud about a foot after sleeping all winter is beyond me. I can barely get my coffee made in the morning, and I have a machine that grinds the beans.
• Everything from Gurney’s died. Every last plant. We shall speak no more of this.
• The chicks are starting to look an awful lot like chickens. I’d been worried about becoming too attached to them. Not to worry. They look just like animated crosses between rubber joke chickens and tiny feathered dinosaurs. I don’t think I could any more become emotionally attached to one of these things than I could a snake. Please do not write to me if you love your snake. That’s not really my point.
• I keep adding stuff to the chicken house to get it to stop bothering me when I look at it. I just added a 18″x24″ (that’s 5 metres by 16 kilograms to you metric folks) window. I literally took a sawzall to the side of the thing, carved out a big hole, and then tried to find some kind of window for it. I ended up going with acrylic because I found a nice thick piece at HD for about $10. Today, I added extensions to the corner posts and crossbars to the tops of those to try to solve the “roof” problem. I’d like to have shade in the summer and rain protection in the winter. I don’t want to buy more corrugated fiberglass (at $18/each, and I’d need 5 probably, not to mention the mounting pieces… it’d be a couple hundred dollars before I was done.) I had all this junk (short of a couple dollars of hardware) in a pile in back already. It’s not quite right, but it’s getting better.
• This really should have pictures… everything has buds on it, and some, like the Nichols plum are open. The back area with the fruit trees is really going to be pretty in spring in a few years. The hostas are just starting to pop their heads out. The trillium are up and flowering. We should have a decent crop of blueberries judging by the number of flowers. We’ve been eating some from the garden straight through winter, but the purple broccoli really headed up in the last couple of weeks.
• The greenhouse is getting very full of teensy tiny plants. I’ve got about five flats of seeds going, and even so, today I broke down and bought some lettuce, broccoli, and arugula starts at Fred Meyer. I figured it couldn’t hurt to stick them in the ground just to get some early goodies.

That’s enough bullet points. I promise to try to take some pictures soon.

I really need to put more tags out. One problem with lots of perennials is that they disappear every winter. That’s kind of nice for clean up and a break, but it’s a bummer when they come up right under the shrub you just moved or you buy one because you forgot that you bought the same damn thing last year.