March 25th....more snow

Today's forecast was for more snow.  When I hear this I always think of the funny story about the man who was so excited to shovel snow during the first snowfall.  By the 2nd week he was less than excited about the white stuff.  This winter I'm beginning to feel a little like Jack Nicholson in the Shining!  Enough with the snow!

On a more positive side, we received a quote from a gutter guard company today.  MasterShield Gutter Guards.  They guarantee that their mesh shield deflects everything that is larger than 1/2 the size of a human hair. Pine needles seem to be a large part of their guarantee.  In fact they give a list of the types of pine needles on their website:

• eastern white pine
• western white pine
• sugar pine
• red pine
• pitch pine
• jack pine
• longleaf pine
• shortleaf pine
• loblolly pine
• slash pine
• Virginia pine
• ponderosa pine
• pinyon pine
• Jeffrey pine
• lodgepole pine

This made me curious as to what is a Loblolly Pine?  Pinus Taeda is commonly referred to Loblolly Pine.  The forestry industry refers to this tree as the Southern Yellow Pine.  This is the 2nd most common tree (as identified by the US Forestry Service) in the U.S., after the red maple.If we had a pine this tall we would be worried about pine needles in our gutters.  Fortunately for us our one lonely pine tree is much small than this tree.

Sometime this Spring (whenever it arrives) we will become the happy owners of gutter guards.  This will keep my husband safe, he likes to climb the ladder at every chance to clean out the gutters.  I'm not trying to keep him from moving about and exercising, just trying to keep his feet on the solid ground.

In the meantime I will keep watering my seedlings, and dreaming of warm Spring days.