Gardening Season Arrives

Try as I might, I haven't been able to make much progress with Bard this week so far.

Over the weekend, I spent some time in the yard raking leaves and debris out of the flower beds and generally checking things over. The perennials are coming up rapidly now, so time was of the essence to prevent damaging tender young shoots. My husband also got out the gardening wagons for hauling things around and also some old fence that we didn't get down last fall. I'll use it to fence off the rest of the shrubs before the deer can munch off the new shoots and "prune" them in very undesirable ways.

My neighbor told me that the big doe which has been hanging around the area the past few years was hit by a car last winter. I confess that I secretly celebrated this fact since it meant that she would not be back to ravage my yard and steal our apples this year. I'm sorry that she had to suffer, but that's as far as it goes. Just call me heartless. She and her two yearling fawns did a lot of damage last year. So far, the two fawns have not shown up, but I'm taking no chances.

Then on Sunday I was hit by a spammer who used my email address to send out what must have been hundreds of thousands of spam emails. Over two thousand delivery failure notices were in my inbox Sunday morning, and close to another two thousand arrived during the day! It took a lot of time to go through all of them and delete them, call my web host to see if anything could be done about it (it can't) and generally obsess over how long this would go on. But, thankfully, by Monday morning the onslaught had waned and things are now back to normal. In my opinion, an exception should be made for the use of waterboarding for spammers who are caught.

And, yesterday I put the apple blossom painting back on the easel for one last time and painted the grass a lighter shade. I'm not quite sure that it's an improvement, but instinct tells me that I'd better not fuss with this painting again or it will go south in a hurry. There is definitely such a thing as too many tweaks when it comes to art as we artists are all aware.

I did manage to paint Bard's ears last night but didn't get any further.

Today was chopped up by this and that, but tomorrow I'm dedicating the whole day to studio time. Then I'll have art to show again.

The image above is of one of our forsythia shrubs which is now in bloom. Believe it or not, it's the best of the three and shows the results of deer pruning by its uneven shape. Ugly or not, the fences are staying around the shrubs until they get big enough that the deer can't damage them too badly. From a distance, you can't see them at all!