Sunday Morning Review

Awoke to a yard covered with snow this morning. "Why does it have to do that?" asked Daughter. It's light and fluffy and won't stay, but still. I was raking pine cones yesterday and the kids set up a baseball diamond in the yard. Now everything's buried, and that sucks.

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On pine cones: I have thousands of them in my yard this spring. We must have had good conditions for pine trees last year following by a windy winter. Wonder what makes for better-than-average pine cone production? Whatever it was, it also made for some serious spring raking.

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The Vermont Fish and Wildlife office is reminding everyone that it's time to bring in bird feeders because the bears are waking up hungry, and they love those seeds. I haven't seen any bears in our yard, but I do have neighbors with a few bent and twisted feeder poles.

I didn't feed the birds much this year because my dogs also love those seeds -- the ones the birds thrown on the ground. The dogs subsequently develop some supremely offensive gas. I'm going to clear a bird-feeding spot outside the dog's zapper fence next winter because I like to host cardinals in particular in the winter.

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My seeds in the greenhouse froze the other night, so as my friend Rosemarie says, "I guess that experiment's over." I brought the seeds inside.

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I wanted to blog about the White House planting the First Garden, but even People Magazine picked up that story, so I'll pass. But I do have a couple notes on the subject...

The Obamas have to buy their own groceries, so of course they should have a garden. I appreciate that they're making it big enough that they can donate extras to a local food shelf.

On "60 Minutes" last weekend, Alice Waters, queen of sustainability and chic Berkeley dining, said that she has been working on getting a garden at the White House for, like, the past 10 years. I wonder how much influence she had in the project. No doubt that she couldn't get her message heard during the past 8 years...