A few days ago I went out to the front yard to get some overwintered rosemary for the lamb chops and saw that the herbs were beginning to green up. The sage has gone from dusty grey to bright green and thickened considerably. The mint has surreptitiously expanded out of its bed over the winter and will have to be fought back into place. It's half way across the yard.  The rosemary hasn't really started to do a lot relating to spring. This could be because we kept having warm spells all winter and it would put out new growth only to be frozen back, but this time might be the charm. The Thyme is rising and the parsley is evident.  The oregano is expanding as well. It's time to get some basil in the ground, I think. The lavender is turning blue. After the last rain I found two nice chanterelles growing out of the compost pile. We get three or four a year and I shake the spores back onto the pile in the hopes that we will one day get a real bunch of them. One year we had a crop of 'shrooms growing on a maple stump that looked like cepes, but not having acess to a mycologist - I let them go.

    We have an ongoing skirmish with the large herd of deer here in Ardsley. They have been hard on just about everything; the yews are mere twigs and the mountain laural and rhododendron are scandalized, but the local ruminators don't seem to like herbs.  They don't care for the roses either; at least they haven't damaged them. A few weeks ago I bought a bottle of deer repellent and while these have not worked for me in the past this one seems to be doing the job and we might even have some day lilies this summer. The rabbits are out in force, too. They don't like herbs either and just avoid the area.

    The bird feeders are mobbed and Costco has bird seed for once. I got 80 pounds yesterday. that will last until June, I hope. The cow birds have a nasty habit of dumping all the seeds they don't like out of the feeders until they find something they do. They perch and swipe. The squirrells are enriched by this and eventually the cow birds will move on after depositing their eggs in someone else's nest. We have a lovely flock of mourning doves that hangs out under the feeder. Where I grew up these are game birds, but they are protected as song birds here. I can't say much for their singing - it's hard to sing when your mouth is full of seeds - but they do coooo and whistle quite a bit. They are beautiful birds to watch. They frequent the two hopper feeders and when they take off they sound like anemic little bottle rockets making a sweet little whistle sound. They are scared to death of me, but the neighborhood cats get a couple every year. They are ground feeders for the most part. The goldfinches are almost finished molting and have become GOLDfinches. The house finches and wrens are about, too.

    The chickadees could care less who is around and could be trained to come to hand. The crows are staying high up in the trees as the feeders are too small for them. The cardinals and jays and woodpeckers are plentiful this year. The woodpeckers like the old apple trees that I will have to replace before too many more years. The apples trees are macs, I think. We get an ocassional crop from them and one year made many pies and apple sauce. I don't maintain them well enough or often enough to count on them and they were very old for apple trees when I got here. The deer REALLY like these trees. They can't reach any of the apples because the trees have gotten so tall - much taller than they should have been allowed to get - but they do drop a lot of small fruit for several weeks in mid summer.  

     The skunks are out, too. We smell them, but they haven't started tearing up the yard for grubs. It is to be hoped that they have wiped out the grub population and the yard will look less cratered this spring.