False Spring has Sprung

This past week has been a crazy one for me. I am recovering from a bout of pneumonia which, in all honesty, probably should have put me in the hospital...but I'm too stubborn an old girl to do that, so I've been nursing back to health slowly. I cannot remember the last time when I have taken so much medicine. I don't take anything -- an aspirin or Tylenol for a headache, nothing. Zero...zip...nada. This week, however, I have been laden down with all sorts of things -- scary things that I'd prefer not to take, actually. Cough medicines, antibiotics, steroids, and an inhaler. I always have to laugh when they ask me which medications I take during the intake portion of the exam and I say, "None." It's as though they don't believe me. "None?", they ask, skeptically...and then it kind of ticks me off that maybe the think that I have just forgotten which meds I take.

"Not anything? Nothing for high blood pressure? Diabetes? Cholesterol?"

"Nope," I reply..."None."

I think that it is because I am over 50 and overweight. Not morbidly obese, mind you, but not as thin as I once was. However, I attribute my general good health to an active lifestyle and eating mostly natural, homegrown things.

But...that is not the real point of today's post. It is just an aside that I thought about as I started to type.

What this post is REALLY about is our exceptionally mild winter and my fear that with the warm weather we have been having that the plants are responding as if spring is already here. Can you blame them? We have had not one flake of snow so far this winter and it is almost the last day of January. The temperature this past weekend was quite warm and it is supposed to reach 70F by Wednesday. My daffodils are poking up out of the ground and many of the trees are starting to bud.

"Too soon," I keep thinking..."It's too soon!"

Yet...we all get sucked into this early spring thing. I was at the feed store this afternoon and folks were loading up carts with seeds and all sorts of gardening items. I, too, succumbed to the call of the garden sirens. I placed my seed order this week from

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

...my very favorite seed supplier. They are local to me here in Central Virginia (actually at the other end of the very same county where I live). I went crazy with ordering...but that's okay. I plan to save those seeds that I do not sow this season.

I also pulled out the little peat pots and Jiffy mini "greenhouses" (quite a stretch calling them greenhouses, actually -- more like plastic trays with clear plastic lids). I bought all sorts of good things and I am going to be sowing some lettuces in my cold frame (which I never posted photos of, I just realized) very soon. I will start them in the house in the Jiffy greenhouses and then move them out to the cold frames when they are big enough.

This early spring thing is absolutely infectious!