Thanks, @mountainjewel! What a lovely comment.

The beauty of studying your land's cues like this is that it builds up understanding over time (something I know anecdotally, but not yet personally as I've not even lived here a year!) Maybe you won't know what correlates with the sap running or the Pawpaws budding (oh, how I love pawpaws!) but after a few years, maybe patterns will become clear. Or, if there's a year where things are totally off, maybe that's a year to pay attention to! (Have you ever read The Long Winter , part of the Little House Series? The book starts with Pa noticing a ton of weird phenological cues that the winter is going to be bad...)