Oh what a beautiful morning,

Oh what a beautiful day,

I've got a wonderful feeling,

Everything's going my way.

Yesterday's high here at the house was 37.  When I got up this morning the thermometer already said 55 degrees!  Time to go out and poke around.

It was surprisingly windy for morning.  Yes, I know its March.  But usually the wind is quiet early in the day.  I got my pear tree sprayed with dormant oil and started on the apple trees.

I'll come back to the apple trees later in the week and get up into the canopy better when there is less wind.  And then I need to do a lot of pruning.  I prune every spring but the trees are growing fast and we had such a glut of apples last year I am no longer afraid to prune off too much of my future crop.  These trees can take some heavier pruning this year to open them up.

The lettuce I left under the frost cover seems to have survived the bitter winter despite having weeks of nights in the single digits.  The darker red lettuces didn't survive.  They are much more tender and don't even store well.  Some of the varieties did very well.  I cleaned out the dead leaves and covered them back up.  Perhaps we will have some extra early lettuce when these plants begin to grow again.

My potting mix is thawing out.  I now have enough soil to pre-sprout my 

ranunculus corms.

My husband was able to get into the gravel pile.  He put a fresh coat of gravel on the areas of the driveway where the mud was coming up through.  In the winter, a fair amount of gravel gets displaced by plowing but the mud also continues to come up in some areas.  This will prevent us from tracking mud into the garage.

A couple of weeks ago we had a couple of bright sunny days near 40 degrees.  The second day I noticed that the Alberta Spruce was beginning to brown out on top.  I've never had it brown on the top like this.  Only on the bottom edges.  Lesson learned:  the Wilt Stop is not enough to keep the top safe.  After I covered the bottom I sprayed the whole tree.  The bottom is being well protected by the burlap and shows no signs of drying out.  The day I noticed the damage I grabbed some burlap and wrapped the whole tree.

Next year it will be fully wrapped from the beginning.

After we had done these few outdoor chores we spent some time working in the garage with the doors open.  It was wonderful to get the fresh air.  We are three weeks into installing bead board on the ceiling in here.  We have a lot of bead board ceilings.  It started with the Southern Yellow Pine in the older part of the house to replace the original material which was too damaged to save.  We continued in the big garage and have three rooms and a hallway done.  The garage ceilings are Larch, the first of which came from our own giant Larch tree that was felled to make room for said garage.

We prepared about two days worth of wood.  We have to square the ends of each board and cut out any irregular parts in a way to minimize the waste.  We prepare the wood ahead of time, measuring each board and writing the measurement on the back then sorting by size.  We found after the first couple of days that we needed to both spend time to get the wood ready first.  The cut as you go method wherein one person is looking for the right board to cut 30 inches out of while the other person waits on the scaffold second guessing each decision form a distance....

By noon we were done and spent some time sitting on the deck in the warm sun watching the robins hunt bugs in the lawn and the ash limbs fall in the woods from the gusty winds.

Spring is just around the corner!