The drought continues unabated. I have had to resort to a bout of unusual deep watering for this time of year to hopefully buffer against tree/shrub/perennial  losses, as they have begun actively growing nearly a month early, and now that weather has become more normal and cooler than it was in the incredible heat of March and isn’t as likely to evapotranspire away as quickly. This year is not the year to plant ANYTHING new or transplant anything; my goal is to simply help gardens hang on until the drought abates. Watering restrictions are in place in many communities between Denver and Wyoming, though our ELCO water company so far only suggests restraints on watering. I feel guilty for doing any watering. But I figured deep watering once now and hopefully not again for weeks rather than shallow watering every 3x per week as I would do once my drip is turned on in mid May, so that I will be more likely to save plants already stressed, even some of my most drought tolerant native (and some nonnative xeric) plants. Amazingly, I am seeing some green winter wheat fields in our area. I have no clue how…. But it’s the one thing that held me back from clicking severely dry rather than moderately. It must be that those areas have received a bit more rain or snow than we have. But so far local lawns are brown. Flowering fruit trees like crabapples bloomed way ahead of normal and blooms aren’t lasting very long, likely due to wind desiccation, and it is much windier overall this year than what I think of as normal. Even our native plum blossoms disappeared because finches ate them all! This is a totally new behavior, which I suspect may be related to drought and associated lack of food resources overall. Reservoirs are very low and some wetlands appear very diminished (or even dry) in water levels.