Pollen!

I guess unless you live in a desert, you have pollen.  Have we got pollen!  The offender is the live oak tree--that magnificent twisty, gnarled tree that can survive for years and years in the Texas heat and drought.  Live oak trees, for all their beneficial shade, do have a couple of drawbacks:  first, millions of tiny leaves that fall not in the autumn, but the spring!  Just when you want to start cleaning up the yard for spring, there is a deluge of tiny leaves, quickly followed by new leaves on the trees.  The good thing is, there are leaves all winter.  The bad aspect is cleaning up all those leaves when you really want to be planting.

And then there is the pollen.  The pollen explosion this year is the worst in 25 years--and the volumes are off the charts.  The local television stations post the pollen counts.  4,000 is considered high; today the count was at 11,000; Sunday it was over 40,000!  Everything is coated in yellowish-green pollen.  My black car is no longer black; my gardening shoes look as if I had been mowing the yard (I have not).

Luckily, we do not have pollen allergies, as some people do--and they are miserable right now.  I did find that, after a day of working in the garden, I had to take out my contact lenses, however.  My eyes did react to the pollen explosion.  How long does it last?  Would you believe until the end of April?