Cold and Wet

I was very surprised to see a hummingbird at the feeder today - It is still very cold and wet. I cannot imagine how the poor thing manages to survive. I put a small amount of sugared water in each of my three feeders and hung them outside two days ago because I thought late April/early May was around the time the hummers normally returned. This year I expected them much later because of the lousy weather we've been having. When I saw this female hummer this morning I made a fresh batch of sugar water hoping she would be able to survive until warmer finally arrives. (Clicking on photos will enlarge them.)

So please, if you have feeders, fill them and put them out now to attract and keep the arriving hummers nearby. More will be arriving soon.

Even though it's very cold, I put the over-wintered and garaged geraniums outside in order to toughen them up. I know we'll can still expect frosts in my neck of the woods for another week or two or three but if that happens I just throw a bed-sheet over them at night and they'll be just fine. Korpur, as always, needs to be right there giving me directions on how to do stuff.

Planted only a few years ago, most of the daffodil bulbs have divided and divided again so that one bulb is now many producing many flowers - that is unless the deer eat them. It's important to leave the green leave up until they turn brown and wither because they are making food in order that the bulb can divide and store food to enable them to survive through next winter. (Reminds me of the ant and the grasshopper, eh?)

Not as showy as daffodils and hellebores, the hazelnut catkins, the male pollen bearing structures or hazelnut bushes, are open and releasing their pollen into the wind. Flowers with showy petals usually rely on insects to pollinate stigma, the female parts of the plant. Plants that rely on wind for pollination usually have very small, or even missing, showy flowers . Each wind gust releases the pollen. Of course they have to produce large quantities of pollen because the chances of finding areceptive stigma are small. So instead of putting energy into petals and sepals to attract animal pollinators, the energy goes into producing more pollen. Finding the stigmas on a plant like hazlenuts is a neat trick! But it happens and often so that the delicious hazlenuts or filberts are produced each autumn.

Look closely at the opening maple buds which will appear very soon and you can see their tiny flowers. They're actually quite pretty but because they also rely on the wind for pollination, the petals and sepals are very small.