Spring In The North Country

It was a long, cold, snowy winter and spring came about a month late to the north country. But it arrived suddenly, explosively. These pink buds appeared one day:

And turned into old fashioned Bleeding Hearts the next day:

The lawn (and I use the term loosely) was suddenly filled with Violets:

My little rooster pecked around the Daffodils:

The Shadbush trees bloomed along the edges of the north field:

I began hauling more brush out to the brush/lumber pile in the woods and discovered that some animal had stripped the bark off of all the branches in the top half of the pile. Mice? Deer? Porcupine? All of the above? I'll probably never know:

Dandelions, simultaneously the most beautiful and most pesky of flowers, bloomed everywhere. Notice the little orange beetle on the flower to the right:

I left 18 eggs for my broody hen to try raising chicks. I had to mark them so I could remove any new eggs which other hens laid in the nest. I continued to remove the newer eggs and refrigerate them for feeding to the dogs later:

The cherry tree bloomed, but not prolifically. There won't be a bumper crop this year like there was last year:

The pear tree, however, bloomed enthusiastically:


The apple blossoms budded, but hadn't yet opened when I took these photos:

The flowering crabs, likewise, were only buds on the day I took these photos. Spring indeed arrived here with all its splendor, however belatedly: