Signs of Spring

I finally got out and put a tap in one of the maple trees yesterday. On the left you can see the sap flow inside the blue tubing.

By this morning when I went out to check, I had the full gallon jug of maple sap on the right, with a frozen sap-sicle down the side and ice in the top.

I'm hoping the weather will stay like this (above freezing during the day and below freezing at night) so we get a good sap run.

Every so often someone will ask if drilling the hole for the tap hurts the tree. Well, I don't like to see those trees with six taps in them, even if they are big trees, but if it's a healthy tree and you're not tapping it to death, the holes grow shut within a year or so and look like this:(Don't look at me! I just took the pictures, and that's how they look.)

Then I went looking for spring flowers, and this is what I got: the first winter aconites, sweet violet leaves flat from being under all the snow, and the snowdrops drilling their way upwards through the dead leaves.

Of course, the biggest sign of spring, besides that fact that I can't sit still and knit for more than two minutes at a time, is the deep gluey mud out where my new car is parked, but I didn't feel like laying on my stomach in it to get a good photo!

Instead I went out and kicked the frozen basketball for Truffles.

She is a ball chaser extraordinaire, and she really misses our ball-chasing sessions when her toys are buried or frozen in the snow.

She was overjoyed to find her ball unthawed so she could gallop after it and herd it around the yard again!