Last year I ran out of tomato stakes, so ended up re-purposing the snow poles for the summer -- made for some rather garish planters! No sign of the peepers here yet, it's going to be a while before they and the bullfrogs show up, I think, but I can't wait to hear them.

White Flower Farm is wonderful! I might need to order some snowdrops from their online shop. My present snowdrops were purchased at a church plant sale 5 yrs ago & a few seem to disappear each year....

Many years ago I found real English bluebells in the White Flower Farm catalogue and decided that I was going to begin to turn my woods into a paradise like the spring woods at Bolton Abbey. Started off with a hundred dollars worth of the bulbs — and once planted never saw them again. However, I did have the best fed voles on the east coast, who really enjoyed the change from their usual diet of hosta roots.

Yes, the voles are voracious here, too, as are the chipmunks & squirrels, all of whom seem to eat bulbs. (Daffs appear to be the only bulbs that aren't appealing to these creatures....) Between them and the deer who browse through regularly, my plantings are always under siege.

That explains why no bulbs grow and I have big holes in the beds.
I have decided to plan for better weather and open the pool next week. Usually doesn't happen till Memorial weekend but as the gardeners came and did the spring cleanup today and we are forecast 70 for Friday...Got to be warmer than Skegness, where I went in the sea every weekend as a child from Easter till September.

Had to run my A.C today. The temperature inside the house hit 80 F.

Totally sick to the hilt of the winter storms. This morning (April 11th) driving up I-89 in Vermont in snow and 6 degrees of frost. I hate winters in the north east USA.

Bloody hell - just looked at the next seven days. Wall to wall rain and snow. Except for the ice storm expected over the weekend. (Today wasn't too bad, though.)

I'm off to England on Wednesday. I think I'll refrain from looking at the Norfolk forecasts - I'll surprise myself!!

Yes! I have holes in my beds and holes in my pots, even the pots hanging up higher on the wall. (Those last must be the pole-vaulting squirrels...or birds!)

I'm slowly learning which flowers are not attractive to hungry wildlife. Trouble is we have too many kinds of critters around here, so items not attractive to voles or woodchucks will still get grazed down to the ground by deer soon after they sprout. So frustrating!!

I can't grow peas or beans, the rabbits and deer are too fond of them.

Crocuses I'm lucky with. I have tens of thousands of them flowering right now, and most of them are growing in areas popular with chipmunks and their underground bunkers. I planted them fifteen or twenty years ago, mostly, and they've probably increased at least tenfold. The ground is covered with acorns, so maybe the chipmunks and other critters ignore the crocuses?

Are they Thomasinia crocus? Those may be the only crocus bulbs unappetizing to voles. I'm not sure how chipmunks and squirrels feel about them, but the Thomasinias that I've planted have survived so far....

Here's a link:
Crocus in spite of voles –You Can Grow That! - joene's garden

Yes, a high proportion of my crocuses are Tommies. Beautiful they are, too, and they spread like wildfire! However, they seem a bit fragile and get knocked out by rain and snow...

But my horticultural crocuses, the Dutch Giants or whatever, also seem to survive and spread pretty well. I suspect the answer may be partly that we have so much else to eat. We have several oak trees, of different species, with acorn abundance in different years..

No storms here but seems Minneapolis is getting it hard.

Making some of our flights cancel.

Although I don't know if we have voles we definitely have chipmunks and squirrels, but this year I have had very few crocuses come up, and some of those not where I had planted, so I suspect rodent intervention. I shall have to try Thomasinia crocuses this year. My daffs seem to have survived, though possibly a little depleted in quantity. I think I have lost my sage and lavenders but my redcurrants and gooseberry have made it without any special treatment. Next month I shall know for certain and will restock as necessary.

For the non-Tommie and non-daffodil bulbs, have you ever tried planting in cages? Some people on a garden forum I belong to construct little boxes out of 1/4 inch hardware cloth, and plant their bulbs inside these to prevent hungry rodents from getting to them. I've never done that, but I have bought discounted suet cages (for bird feeding) and buried those with a couple of bulbs inside each. It seems to work.

One of my sages looks dead (very crispy leaves) but I'm going to hope it comes back. They were one of the first things I planted, and have survived droughts, flooding, deep freezes--all with very little attention paid to them, so I had the illusion that sage was impervious.