A Few Notes

Nobody wants to do much growing during these cloudy, often rainy, cool days, but finally, I see some celery seedlings poking their heads up, as well as the carrots.

Other things that never died back during the warm winter, such as the tarragon, walking onions, rhubarb and dianthus, are managing without the sun.

Red Crimson Dianthus

Volunteer poppies and Tarragon

The peas are slowly coming along.

I keep watching for some signs of growth on the rosemary and lavender plants that were in the garden all winter, but nothing's happening.  I haven't entirely given up on them, but I'm thinking that I'll eventually have to.  The recommendation for winter mulching on certain plants is not to do it before the ground has frozen.  This allows the plant to have made its own transition to a dormant state and stay there.  If the ground freezes and thaws, the plant may suffer more damage.  Here's how an online article at The Spruce puts it:

A steady temperature will keep the plant in dormancy and prevent it from triggering new growth during a brief warm spell. Tender, new growth too soon will just result in more winter die back. Mulching now will also help conserve whatever water is in the soil, so hopefully, you’ve been keeping your garden beds watered right up until the hard frost.

Our winter weather was totally crazy this year. It was rather dry, and I don't think the ground ever froze, but what probably did happen was that plants that would normally harden off and go dormant for the winter never managed to do it, and I think that's why I lost a beautiful 'Pink Enchantment' rose, a crepe myrtle sapling, and probably the rosemary and lavender when the temperatures dived.  If mulching would have prevented these deaths, which I'm not convinced it would have, I really wouldn't have known when to do it.

Other things seemed to not be affected at all, while still others, such as the hyacinths, performed very differently from previous years.  Last year, I had hyacinth blooms for two weeks: the last week in March, and the first week in April. I didn't record the bloom period for the previous year, but my recollection is that it was about the same. This year, they started blooming in early February, and there are still a few just now fading!  The early warmth and late cool weather has prolonged their bloom time considerably.  I'm not complaining in that regard, but so many other things have suffered.

The sun is forecast to come out in a couple of days, and then the temperature is supposed to drop to near freezing in the early hours of Friday morning.  This is crazy.

In the meantime, if you're a Lepidoptera fan, here's a great Flickr site that matches butterfly and moth larvae (in the case of the genus Lepidoptera, commonly called caterpillars) to their adult forms:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/itchydogimages/sets/72157677190448311

And, here's a picture of one of my favorite spring denizens that thankfully seems to be unaffected by the temperatures as long as it doesn't get a hard freeze after the buds open:

Good luck, gardeners!