Definition of Spring, right? Mercurial? Changeable? Inconstant? Fickle, even? It certainly applies. Most of last week was gloomy and gray and generally down in the dumps. Then Friday was glorious – the daffodils started to bloom and spirits lifted. Saturday was somewhere in the middle – gray, sunny – gray, sunny. Sunday? Wrong term – it was back to rain. No sun in sight. My moods are mirroring the season, and it is driving me nuts – on sunny days I’m balanced, productive, positive. Cloudy ones find me dragging out of bed, plodding through work, sitting dumbly in front of the TV after dinner and generally being a lump. I knew the sun was important to me, but this season is making that terribly obvious.
We got some good work in Saturday, prepping to make hay while the sun shines, or some such Farmer’s Almanac drivel – tilled the entire vegetable garden, treated it with Black Kow fertilizer (call to Bob: hi, we have 500 pounds of shit in the trunk), treated the fruit trees (ambitiously known as the orchard) and I dug up the space for my soon to be cutting garden. I’m so excited to have flowers I can walk out back and cut with abandon. I can’t wait to look out my bedroom window and see waves of color. I sat with a friend last Monday and we poured over flower catalogs, picking out this and that and making sure we had the right balance of color to build bouquets. I tilled under a lot of dirt to make a home for the flowers - because I didn’t have enough garden to weed last summer…
Sometimes I think I’m best at biting off more than I can chew: the vegetable garden was 30x70 last year, and I just added 10 or 15 feet in length so as not to “crowd the corn.” And then there’s the cutting garden I’ve created - a whole new space behind the house, wrapping around the tree/bush combo that looms beyond the patio and extending into a sizeable rectangle to the right of it. I’m not going out there with a tape measure – I don’t really want to know how many more square feet of dirt I need to care for this summer. The vegetable garden is already like weeding a 2500 square foot house. My back and legs ache at the thought of bending over to take care of all that dirt, all those plants, all those bloody tenacious weeds. But then I look at the seed catalogs.
Seed catalogs suck me in. They convince me that growing three varieties of squash is perfectly reasonable, that four types of corn will give me the sequential harvest I’m looking for. I love picking the different varieties, looking at last year’s notes on what performed well and what didn’t (and thinking that the longer I garden, the better my histories will be), considering trying new things just because. I have a mental image of myself in a floppy hat collecting beautiful produce from well-manicured rows. This year I’m going to have fewer weeds, because it is the second year for the soil, because I’ve taken better care of it, because I’m going to learn from my mistakes. This year I’m going to manage my drainage and not let the tomatoes and melons drown. This summer I’m going to get the cucumbers trellised early, keep the weeds down early, actually thin my row crops correctly. This is going to be a wonderful gardening summer, unless we have another unusually wet season…
I know March (Spring in general) is the wet time of year here, but this rain, this gray, this damp – I’m afraid it is just a sign of ongoing dampness to come. What if we have another miserably wet summer? What if all my tomatoes drown again, sad twisted black wraiths in a mosquito filled swamp? All the nice garden tools I want, all the special organic fertilizers – what if they are all a waste of money because the summer dumps water rather than sunlight on my garden? And the cutting garden – I have no idea what I’m doing! Just because I managed one scraggly row of zinnias and cosmos last summer doesn’t mean that I’m going to be successful with flowers in bulk. I don’t know if I should plant in rows or scatter the seed randomly or maybe plant in blocks? What if it all dies and looks weedy, or it doesn’t get enough sun, or the cats roll around in it and break the flowers? Then what?
But the sun is shining today. The daffodils are blooming and I read my gardening books and made notes on my seed lists about when to plant what. I’m doing the hard work now, it will pay off in bushels of vegetables and armfuls of flowers later. I’m sure of it – until the clouds come back and the crisp shadows slide into muddy light – and then the garden is sure to fail. C’mon, sun, stay out, because my mood swings are driving ME crazy! I can only imagine how Mike feels.
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