It's Spring!

According to the calendar, this is the first day of Spring. However, yesterday was pretty spring-like, too. And we've been busy on the farm with spring chores, even in the rain... Johnny making ditches to run the rainfall off the driveway plus a hundred other projects, me digging weeds and deadheading daffodils plus a hundred other projects. I figured out I could have daffodils blooming for many months if I planted all different kinds. But I didn't think about the fact that I would then be deadheading daffodils for months and months. Here are some of the varieties in bloom now...

The path to the shop is full of daffodils and primroses.

Even the grapes at the back of the woodshed are lined with daffodils. Look at all that wood Johnny has stored up!

Spring on the farm means baby goats, too. Well, one baby goat so far, born March 8... more coming soon.

Here she is brand new

And today, exploring with mom

Lots of pen cleaning and hoof trimming and udder clipping in this soggy weather... but we don't just work on the farm every day. Once in awhile we go hunting for waterfalls (stories in previous post and also in Waterfalls blog). And March is the last month we do winter raptor surveys. It's been tricky fitting them in during cooperative weather. We did the Grand Ronde route early, on March 3rd. Finally did the North Santiam route last Thursday, March 17, St. Pat's Day. It was a lovely, mostly sunny day... with lots of snow still in the mountains. Here is Mt. Jefferson...

Mt. Jefferson

I didn't take many other photos on the route, but this cormorant in the reflection of tree trunks caught my eye.

Double-crested Cormorant at Lyons City Park

  And I was excited to find a Say's Phoebe!

Say's Phoebe near Gates and my late dad's ranch

 
The mountains we can see from our farm still have snow on this first day of spring while our fields are green with fast-growing grass.

When it rains too hard, I work on Still Life in the Goat Lane, the third in my Goat Lane series of humor books. It's been a long time in the works, but I am making progress... when it rains, which it usually does in western Oregon... in fall, winter... and in floriferous, beautiful Spring.

Adding a spectacular footnote to this first day of spring, one of our night-blooming epiphytes opened this evening, spreading its perfume through the "jungle" (our jungle room greenhouse).