Beautiful flower Cynthia, a very pleasant surprise indeed: congratulations!

Thanks Sarah! Last night didn't get as cold as they said and praying tonight's won't either! Iris, Thanks! They are redbud tree, tulip tree and crab apple branches. All just loaded with buds right now. Ahhh! Stay away freeze!!

I had one family move into the Norway Maple in my backyard. She chose an inconspicuous crotch on a downward pointing branch. I wondered what kind of growth was occurring on the tree branch until I finally saw her returning home! It was a hummingbird nest, after all! The nests are well camouflaged and resemble mossy caterpillar webs. If you're trying to judge a nest from afar, use binoculars. Without actually seeing the bird fly to the nest there would have been no other way to identify it from the ground.

If you planted both peas at the same time and they germinated at the same time, if you base your expectations on estimated Days To Maturity, then Sugar Ann should be about two weeks earlier, but there's no guarantees because Oregon Giant Dwarf Snow Peas might like the cooler weather a little better. I do like that they are giants and dwarfs at the same time, which kinda makes me grin because it just sounds wrong. That is part of the magic of gardening---sometimes plant names make no sense. There's an heirloom tomato that illustrates this perfectly (really, there's tons of them). It is called Big White Pink Stripes. So, are you picturing a large white tomato with pink stripes? That seems logical, right? Nope. It is more of what I'd call a medium-sized peach colored fruit both inside and out, with a faint pink blush (sometimes) on the blossom end. Many people never see the white striping, so I guess we can assume the white striping might happen in some climates but not all or perhaps at a certain stage of fruit growth. Who knows. I bet when someone named it Big White Pink Stripes, it was a name that made sense at the time. I believe the first dwarf tomato plant I ever grew was called New Big Dwarf, because a big dwarf makes sense too, right? At least the silliness of the names can keep us amused. Early GIrl is one of the stragest tomato plants I've ever grown. Don't get me wrong. It produces great. It doesn't run out of steam and stop producing at mid-summer. It just keeps going. But.... In my garden, Early Girl is rarely early. Almost never. Sometimes plenty of other varieties that have DTMs in the 70s produce ripe fruit before it does. Every now and then, though, it will produce early if not earliest. It makes no sense, and it makes me wonder if there are various strains of EG out there, with some being the true ones that produce early and others having mutated or changed somewhat and producing later. Regardless of whether EG produces early or late, the fruit and taste look the same, and it produces heavily so I grow it. I just know I cannot count on it to be early every year...or sometimes ever. A couple of years ago it was early and the shock almost killed me. This year's earliest ripe fruits have come from the Better Boy I bought in January, which produced ripe fruit by around the third week in March (when it still was inside the house) and SunGolds I grew from seed. The next one to produce ripe fruit will be either the next round of fruit from Better Boy or the fruit on the 4 or 5 Sophie's Choice plants I raised from seed for early fruit this year. Sophie's Choice is a workhorse that produces well and heavily, and it generally is early. All veggie varieties seem to do as they please though, with mid-season and late varieties sometimes freaking you out by producing fruit before the early ones do. Gardening is just weird that way sometimes.