Above: Pea seedlings at WP HQ under a blanket of straw. Temperatures in New Kingston, on the eastern edge of Delaware County, are predicted to drop into the teens tonight. Photo by Lissa Harris.

March came in like a lamb, and it's going out like a lion. Tonight, temperatures will plunge over a wide swath of the Northeast, threatening all the new buds and shoots that have taken advantage of this spring's freakishly warm weather to pop out early.

Now is the time to cover tender plants with protective mulch, and protect any fruit trees and vines that have already begun to bud. GardeningKnowHow.com has some tips on protecting plants in a cold snap. Neat trick: Wrap a tree or shrub with a string of incandescent (not LED) Christmas tree lights, and plug it in overnight.

Above: Filmmaker Jessica Vecchione's cat Greykitty must be free.

• Over in Greene County, former Brooklynite Larissa Phillips and her kids slaughter three roosters under a locust tree, "with every bit of the squeamish, precious, halting nonsense you’d expect of former urbanites." Hey. Props for getting the job done.
• Realtor Amy Wallace snaps some great pix on a walking tour of Uptown Kingston -- but she can't resist Photoshopping a little more blue into the gray sky.
• The Beekman Boys share a springalicious sloe gin cocktail recipe.
• The Saugerties Times reminds us that on wet March nights, it's amphibian road-crossing season. Don't squish the newts.
• The Catskill Cabin blogger hikes up Overlook. Nice weather for it.
• McDonald's is to Coxsackie as Olive Garden is to Grand Forks.
• There's a fungus among us. A new film about Hudson Valley mushroom hunting, Now Forager, premieres in NYC on March 30.
• This weekend, Hunter Mountain is finally throwing in the towel and declaring ski season over -- and so are the rest of the local ski mountains. See you next year, ski bums.

For more random tidbits from around the region, check out Around the Blogshed.

Photos by Jack McShane.

March is the time for putting up bluebird nest boxes, and cleaning out old ones. Watershed Post reader Jack McShane caught these little field mice red-handed -- er, red-pawed -- taking over a bluebird box on his property in Andes. He writes:

Spring cleaning of the bluebird boxes can result in a moral dilemma. Do I eject these little guys who have made cozy homes in my boxes so that they will be available for the bluebirds? Am I being racist, or I guess in this case speciest -- something that might be construed as immoral, bad ethics or just politically incorrect? Now the reality of all this is that these are my boxes constructed and erected by me for the bluebirds and these little (cute and terrified) creatures are after all squatters. Is it not my legal right to be a discerning landlord choosing whom, or what I will make my privately owned housing available to?