Female Rufous Hummingbird

And just like that .. there we have it .. another Spring!

                                   

All of a sudden I had a (female) Rufous Hummingbird at my feeder, just coming through from her wintering site in Mexico and presumably on her way to her breeding grounds in Alaska and northwest Canada, a nearly 4,000 miles flight!
It's just mid-boggling to me that such a small bird is able to to something like that!

                                    

The daffodils are starting to color the neighborhood yellow!

And as always the Forsythias are one of the first to flower!

                 

We celebrated St Patrick's Day with some traditional cornbread and cabbage, cooked to perfection in 90 minutes by my trusty Instant-pot:

And accompanied by the soda bread I baked last week:

                                                               

Right?

I'm starting to see a few deer around the neighborhood and this little buck hung around the orchard for a day and even camped out for the night:

I'm pretty sure this is one of the twins, who frequented the yard last year with his mum and because of his petite size I even suspect it's the smallest one of the two.
He obviously knew where he was, walked around quite confidently and walked straight to the spot way in the back where he used to nap together with his sibling.
I'm so happy he survived, although he looked a little lonely .. and skinny.

I'm itching to start doing something in the garden but it's still way too cold so I'm spending some of my downtime watching youtube-videos about vegetable gardening.
Some of these guys are really entertaining, as well as informative:

   
That is Mark in the pic above, from 'Sustainable me', and next up is 'Gardener Scott' ..

And this is Ben from GrowVeg, a site by the Old Farmers Almanac:

                                                                                   

In the meantime, despite it being Spring and despite a couple of nice days, we're back to snow and sleet for the next two or three .. as we say in Holland:

'Maart roert z'n staart' or 'March stirs it's tail (it looses it's rhyme in the translation)"!