January Spring :-(

 After an unseasonably mild holiday season, we finally got snow this past weekend - enough that I finally had a nice x-c ski on Monday. So much for winter, for now at least. After a day of heavy rain the snow is all but gone and the temperature today was in the fiftys. Spent most of the day taking care of downed branches and trees that had been damaged by the heavy snow. When cutting up the branches of the top of a small tree that had broken off in the storm, I noticed something very disconcerting: tiny buds - tiny buds on January 10th in Massachusetts. Not a good sign! The rule of thumb used to be one could bring forsythia into the house in mid February, put it in warm water and after several days it would bloom. The buds on my forsythia are already tender. What is happening to the fruit trees? Hoping that 2024 won't be even hotter than 2023.*

*"BRUSSELS, Jan 9 (Reuters) - Last year was the planet's hottest on record by a substantial margin and likely the world's warmest in the last 100,000 years, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday."