Spring Grasses

Weather: Unusually warm days with night temperatures just below freezing; last rain 3/19.

What’s blooming in the area: Apricot, peach, crab apple, Bradford pear, purple leaf plum, forsythia. People have been cleaning yards and burning. Water in the village ditch.

Beyond the walls and fences: Siberian elms bright green, alfilerillo, dandelion, western stickseed.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: Small birds, small ants’ hills rebuilt.

Weekly update: Traditional homesteads in the area have four places where grass may grow. The area near the house might have a lawn. Orchards are always grassed. Cultivated fields are bare, unless they grow hay. Outside the perimeter, wild grasses grow.

Orchard grasses are the greenest right now.

The hay is up enough for horses to be out last week. Cattle have been grazing this week.

The lawns have the most variety this time of year. The ones near the river are always the lushest.

The ones out my way vary. One I suspect is Bermuda grass which requires heat and doesn’t green until summer.

Some others don’t usually green up until early summer, but this year have come out with the warm afternoons.

A few are actually converted hay fields.

My neighbor’s yard I suspect, despite his best efforts sowing grass a few years ago, is actually young pigweed.

Photographs: All taken in area 27 March 2015.
1. Lawn, push mower.
2. Lawn, flood irrigation.
3. Orchard grass, flood irrigation.
4. Hay field, flood irrigation, tractor.
5. Lawn.
6. Lawn, flood irrigation, rider mower, fed.
7. Lawn, flood irrigation, rider mower, fed every year.
8. Hay field as lawn, flood irrigation.
9. Carefully manicured weeds, rider mower.

10. Needle grass in my yard, catches water along the gravel drive.