Rushing Spring (sometimes I feel like an ant)

This is the time on year northerners look outside longingly, trying to rush Spring with  thoughts of seedlings and Summer gardens. The truly foolish ones pull back the mulch and uncover tender shoots too soon, all because of one misleadingly warm day.  I've learned to extend the season by gardening inside - and not disrupting Mother Nature's  cycle outside.

The forced forsythia are past, the clivia just coming into their own, and my flowering maple so full of blooms their weight threatens to break the slender branches. My lemon tree is in full fruit, with 9 pints of marmalade newly canned,  and no dent in the  seemingly endless bounty of citrus.  My slipper orchids  will soon sway as a pair, while one passes the torch and the other carries it on towards May Day.

I know it is Spring because of the ant bloom in the kitchen. They are bypassing my ant traps to plant aphids on the new lemon blossoms. Ants are farmers in their own right - harvesting the aphid excrement as fruit of their labors.

Sometimes I feel like an ant.

(A note about the photographs - these are taken with a tiny Transcend Jetfash camera and storage device (2.5"x1"x.5" 128 mb) with no flash and no moving parts except for the camera lens cover (which is the on/off switch) and the release. (It's is my spy camera :)