The Snow White Fuzzy Willow Buds

Bob Bauer

March 04, 2017 (Last Updated: March 06, 2023) | Reading Time: 1 minutes

March 04, 2017

The snow white fuzzy willow buds have turned a pale gray, and now look just like tiny mice c!Inging to the stems. Very cute. Plenty of oak leaves are still laying around if you have some bare spots in your garden. I've got a pile in a stall next to two bales of straw, so I'm ready for the summer to begin. I've read that you shouldn't mulch in early spring because you want the ground to warm up..

Bare ground is not good so you can compromise by pulling back the mulch where you're going to plant. I put clear plastic down and mulch right up to it. The heat that gets trapped in the ground tends to stay there because the mulch acts like insulation..

March 05, 2017

Well I'm glad I got 10 of my mounds covered in plastic before it SNOWED again :( What incredibly unpredictable weather we've had this year. No gardener enjoys scraping snow off his cold frames, it makes him feel that maybe this year he started too early. I'm always pushing the envelope because I forget my failures and remember my succeses. Not much can be done in the garden when there's snow on the ground, so I grabbed a bunch of planting six packs and a tray and sat in front of our fake fireplace planting a whole new spring garden..

Cabbage, spinach, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli and brussels sprouts. If I have extra this spring I'll just make up veggie gift packs for the less fortunate..

March 06, 2017

This is a good time of year to clean up the compost pile. There's black gold down under that mess, and it's teeming with sow bugs and pill bugs. The sow bugs are the fatter flat ones that don't curl up into a ball when you touch them. The pill bugs do, and are also called roly-polys..

Neither are supposed to be harmful to plants, unless there's an abundance of them. I've found damaged plants and they were the only culprits about, so like the night crawlers, maybe they get confused..

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