These are potatoes I bought several weeks ago, ordinary grocery store potatoes and they think it is spring. I will select a few to plant and we will eat the rest. Those I select will be put in the basement near a window so the sprouts won't become long before I want to plant them in the garden about the middle of May. Our last frost date is about June 1 and I don't want to have to cover tender sprouts that pop out of the ground too soon. Something I want to try this year is to plant whole potatoes but with only one sprout each. I've read that the result is larger potatoes. Supposedly the energy from a whole tuber goes into a single stem. My method in the past was to cut the tuber into pieces and let everything grow. Lots of stems and small potatoes was the result. What have I got to loose?
Some rhubarb has begun showing red nubs above the dead grass and leaf mulch that nature provided. I should prune the grapes right away, and get my peas planted soon. Birds are collecting dry grass, weeds and twigs. It's apparently spring enough for some of them. And on those nice days when I wasn't using the wood stove two starlings decided the chimney was a good place to nest. I heard the familiar scratching and flapping noises when they got into the chimney and couldn't get out. I found them lying dead in the fire box when I did need to build a fire. In the past I have attempted to rescue them but choose not to have sooty birds flying around in the house colliding with walls and windows while the door was standing wide open. Nope, they made a dumb and fatal decision. Nature is sometimes quite unforgiving. By the time the birds make it into the fire box they have inhaled a lethal dose of soot and probably don't survive for long anyway.
After a few unseasonably warm, dry and sunny days we've had a lot of wind, some rain, some snow. It's hard to get anything done outside.
So what will I do today? Snow and rain are in the forecast but if I work quickly I might start pruning the grapes.
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