First garden pictures of spring

These pictures were taken just over a week ago, on April 14. I should have grabbed some new pics this weekend, because this time of year the garden changes amazingly quickly. That clematis that was 4 inches high on Wednesday is 8 inches high by Sunday. Buds open, blooms fade, perennials break ground, and the !@#$% grasshoppers hatch and start chomping. Yes, this has happened. We have tiny nymphs about 1/4 inch long. They're almost cute. They'll be a horrible garden-eating plague in less than a month. Ah, spring...

OK, back to the pictures, none of which contain grasshoppers (yet).

Look! Green! It's so exciting to trim away the brown, dead foliage and discover green treasures underneath.

Living in a place with a short growing season has made me appreciate anything that blooms early--like these daffodils and grape hyacinths.





We planted this apple tree our first spring in Flagstaff. I think it's a Fuji. This year it put on a lovely display. No clue if we'll actually get apples. As soon as it started blooming, we had a hard freeze (because of course we did), but it's still lovely.




We have crabapples too, which are a bit hardier in our less-than-optimal climate. Mine have survived on way too much neglect. This year I've resolved to actually water them regularly. Still, the blossoms are beautiful:


We even have a few (very few) edibles already, mostly chives and onions. Here are the walking onions that survived last year's horde of grasshoppers (grasshoppers seem to love anything in the onion family):


That scruffy thing to the left is a leek I planted last spring and forgot to harvest. Some garden handout I read when I moved here said that leeks are, "not adapted" for our climate and/or altitude. Good thing plants don't read garden literature.

I planted garlic last fall. We had a very warm fall, so it sprouted in about November. I worried that our cold winter temps would kill it, but nope. It's standing tall, at least till the grasshoppers show up.


And finally, there's the pond. All ten fish (6 goldfish, 4 koi) survived the winter - hooray! They've starting coming out of hibernation in the last couple of weeks and seem to be doing fine. I've had a heckuva time keeping debris out of the pond (gotta love windy spring days), but it's starting to look tolerable. The day I took these pictures, it was full of algae (blech), but here's a pic of an area onshore that's starting to look spring-y. Just ignore the nasty algae-covered water in the background. It looks better now.


Spring is springing!