The first shot in the dandelion wars has been fired: Over the weekend I pulled up a fledgling and chopped its leaves into my pot full of garbage soup. Take that, Taraxacum officinale!
Not really a war. In fact, I think dandelion blooms are cheerful and last year DF made homemade soda from them. It wound up fermenting and tasted more like a hard cider than a soft drink.
(Acted like one, too, which made DF pretty cheerful as well.)
Even if I hadn’t seen the dandelion greens I would know that it’s spring. Real spring, not calendar spring (March 20, my boot-clad foot), although some refer to it as “breakup.”
How do I know? Let me count the ways.
1. Vanishing snow piles. On today’s walk I had to pick my way past the remains of a pile that had been plowed into an alley, and patches of snow still linger in shady spots. Mostly it’s a thing of the past, although some pretty impressive mountains of the stuff persist in the city’s various snow dumps.
2. Nighttime temps at freezing or better. The other day it was 23 when we got up, but generally the overnight temperatures hover in the low 30s.
3. Daytime temps in the 40s. When you’re in the sun that feels great. In the shade, or when a north-facing breeze smacks you, still a little chilly. But you couldn’t prove it by…
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Yesterday I used every clothespin we own to fill the line-on-a-pulley that DF put up last fall. The sun was out, the temperature was in the mild mid-40s and our laundry was going outside.
