ICK! YUCK! BLECH!

There goes our false spring. Wave bye-bye. So long. See ya. Mother Nature took it back, and took it back with a vengeance. This is what the ye olde Bird backyard looks like now after a solid night of steady rain. We won't be able to access the planter beds for another year I think.

I did have hopes you know. A week or two of nice weather will do that to gardening guys and gals. At first, we remind ourselves, that this can't possibly last. After all, it's January. And, January in Sacramento is normally cold, wet and miserable.

But then the nice weather continues for more than a day or two and stretches into a week, the thinking changes. "Well now," a gardener thinks. "What kind of damage can I do now?" Summer garden planting is out of the question, of course, but it's never too early to get a start on the ol' spring garden, right?

Wrong.

And I have pictures.

It seems hard to believe that just a few days I was digging around and recharging the planter beds shown above. I was planting a new fruit tree -- a Royal Ranier Cherry to go with the Self-Fruiting Bing or Lapice Cherry. I was spraying the weeds, preparing the ground, even fertilizing the lawn.

And now? I have a mud-pit again. My own personal backyard lake -- with several small ponds to boot. I'm frustrated. The wife is frustrated. And the cats are really upset. Do you think they enjoy rolling around in that mud?

Of course, cats don't really understand Mother Nature. They know, almost by instinct, that we provide them with food and water. Therefore, they also believe that we also control the wind and rain, and the looks they've been shooting us show an outright contempt and displeasure.

In short, they want us to turn the water "off" and the sun "on."

Cats are so dumb.

Don't dare make the mistake of stepping into a yard like this one following an all-night rainstorm. That's clay muck out there. In the summer time it's as hard as a ROCK. But in the winter? It's muck-sand. Step in that stuff and you'll sink into the center of the earth. Well, not quite, but you will sink.

And you will also destroy a pair of shoes in the process. It doesn't matter how nice or how cruddy they might be. Step in that muck after a rainstorm and the shoes you are wearing get caked with the stickiest mud known to mankind.

It's back to dreaming about next year's garden again. Our "false spring" just blew out of town.