Birthing Spring

Spring is having a difficult time arriving this year.  Following a lovely Easter day that was warm enough to be outside sitting on the deck, now sleet is clacking against the windows.  The plants are ready to burst through in full bloom, but still the cold, icy wind and rain persists.  The wild pear is barely unfolding its tiny white buds.  I can almost see them holding together against the cold rain just waiting to unfurl themselves in the warmer spring sun.

Despite the cold and rain, there is just a hint of warmth.  Maybe it is the lengthening daylight or the occasionally warm day, but I can almost feel winter loosening its grip.  Despite the calendar, we are in that shoulder season between winter and spring.  It is a birthing process.  It can't happen all at once.  We have to wait patiently while the earth struggles to renew life itself in warm days, bright flowers, verdant grasses and luscious fruits.  It will come, and in the meantime, I gather the meager spring blooms and put them in a vase as a promise of what is to come.

New Garden

As the first warm breaths of spring arrive, I am digging in the dirt.  To me, getting my hands covered with dirt, getting dirt under my fingernails, and having my muscles ache from digging and planting is a pure delight!  It is a chance to renew the cycle of life.

This is my first growing season since we moved to town.  I have to admit having only a coupe of raised beds and some flower beds is quite a different from having a big garden, raised beds, a blackberry patch and a semblance of an orchard.  But I find that even a small area to dig and plant is sufficient for now.  Grandpa had helped me clear all of the weeds from the raised beds during the winter, so over the last few days I have added compost and peat to the heavy soil.  It will take some time to get the tilth just right, but I have time.  

The pleasure was in finding a few worms in the cool soil.  More will come as I improve the soil.  It is good black dirt that smells of the elements of earth.  I turned the soil with a spading fork and hoed the clods and raked it until it was a deep chocolate blanket.  Then came the planting.  Peas and spinach for now.  Rain is promised over the next two days, and the temperatures are warming. Year after year I am always amazed that I feed the earth, drop in a seed,  let sun and rain do their work and marvelous plants that are so good to eat appear.  How can it not be a miracle.

As I planted this morning, the blue birds were singing.  One bright male, puffed up with pride in his own song perched on the handle of my spading fork and watched me plant.  The moon is right for planting, the earth is good and the blue birds are singing.  It can't be anything but wonderful.

It Might Be Spring

Three Nests

Can you identify which 3 species have previously used this box? (Answer located at the bottom of this page.)

Photo © Sally Sims   http://nestwatch.org/learn/how-to-nestwatch/identifying-nests-and-eggs/

Rain is in the forecast, but for now the gray sky makes the perfect background for the lemony daffodils and hot pink hyacinths blooming under the oak tree. This morning I'm watching the battle of the birdhouse.  The bluebirds and the sparrows are vying for rights to the bluebird house. Both come and cling to the front of the box and go in and out.  Without a doubt, I am rooting for the bluebirds!  Last summer we had two pairs of bluebirds who frequented our yard, and I've awaited their return all winter.  Hopefully, they will be the ones to claim the house, but if not, I may have to do the dastardly deed of cleaning out the sparrow's nest to help them along.  I never like skewing the course of nature that way, but  nevertheless, I've been known to do just that.

The starlings have been a problem already this spring.  During the last big snow they swarmed the feeder.  I would look out the window to see only a carpet of black in the yard.  I resorted to my stainless steel pot lids to drive them away.  I have found that clanging two lids together makes  a deafening cacophony that will raise the dead and drive away starlings.  I'm sure the neighbors aren't happy with the noise, but the starlings are gone at least for the time being.

So feeding birds, driving away the noisy, greedy ones and cleaning out sparrow nests may put me on the wrong side of mother nature, but I am determined to fashion my small piece of nature to my own liking with daffodils and bluebirds.

Answer: From bottom to top, House Wren, Carolina Chickadee, and Eastern Bluebird built nests in this box.

Honeysuckle

I become intoxicated every time I go outside these days.  The honeysuckle is blooming, and the heady, intoxicating  scent is almost overpowering.  If you have never smelled drifts of wild honeysuckle, you are missing one of the loveliest scents in the world.  How can I describe the smell?  It is not as citrus as magnolia, but more so than lilac.  Perhaps it is more like a lemony rose.  The scent blocks out every other smell.  It takes you to another realm.  And this wonderful scent keeps me from pulling out all of the invasive honeysuckle vines. The vines are as bothersome and mischievous as the scent is romantic.  The vines  entwine themselves around anything- fences, trees, shrubs, buildings.  They suffocate whatever they grow on.  The sheer mass of the vines can take down a fence or a building.  The vines overpower their surroundings.  The scent is just as overpowering, but it is so sweet and so pleasant, I am willing to submit to the fragrance every spring when the honeysuckle blooms. 

Worms, Asphalt and Hay

Spring.  Nothing is predictable this year.  Several farmers in the area are cutting and baling hay already.  I've never seen them put up hay this early.  That sweet smell took me by surprise last week as I drove the back road home, and sure enough there were the tractors out in the field rolling the long rows of cut grass into large, round bales.

Another sweet smell greeted me in the last few days too. Asphalt.  Yes, the acrid bite of hot tar and the crunch of the fine pieces slapping the side of the car were beautiful.  It means that the pot holes that have plagued us all winter on the country roads are gone.  No more swerving to keep from being swallowed up by the big holes.  No more driving on the wrong side to find a bit of pavement still intact and not totally eaten away.  I had become so used to avoiding the pot holes that I find it difficult to just drive our roads normally! 

What is becoming a perennial sign of spring here is the defoliation of the pine trees.  We have an annual infestation of small worms that eat every bit of green from the pines except the new shoots at the end of the branches.  Right now the trees look ruined and dead.  They just hold out their tender green candles and hope to survive the worms.  With any luck, they will be back in full needle in a few weeks.  Right now, they are a pitiful sight.  The foresters say there is nothing we can do outside of an aerial spraying, and who would want to be coated in insecticide?

So spring continues, and I wait for the next surprises it will bring.

The Waxing Spring Moon

The moon is in its waxing stage.  That means it is moving past the dark, new moon stage and getting brighter as it moves toward the full moon.  Many gardeners plant by the moon and the signs.  I don't use the signs too much, and you can consult an almanac for what are the correct dates for your area.  Generally, my grandma said, "Waxing moon, plant things that fruit above ground; waning moon, plant things that fruit below ground."  So since the moon is waxing, I was in the garden first thing this morning checking to see if I might be able to plant some more lettuce this weekend.  I think I can as soon as the soil dries a bit from all of the heavy rains we have had.  My raised beds drain very well, so I should be able to poke a few seeds into the lovely black soil.  I'm using pelleted lettuce seed this year.  I've not tried that before, so I'm anxious to see how it germinates and grows.  It does make planting lettuce easy and the spacing of it a breeze.  Hopefully, it will mean much less thinning, which I always think of as a waste of perfectly good plants.

This week I was at a national education conference, and I had the opportunity to visit with some women from Wisconsin.  Although they had only 7 inches of snow this year, they had not even started their tender plants inside yet.  I could see the anticipation in their eyes as they talked about being able to put those first tomato seeds in flats in a few days! As I walked to the garden this morning looking for signs of my potatoes sprouting and marveling at the peas and early lettuce coming along, I thought of my Wisconsin friends just waiting to get their hands in the dirt and begin that cycle of planting and harvest.  I didn't have the heart to tell them that my pepper plants, still under the grow lights are 6 inches tall.  The tomatoes and eggplants are about 4 inches tall.  I know the anxious anticipation of planting.  I just crumbled the dirt in my hands, said a prayer of thanks for sun and rain and came in and sorted the seed packets for about the tenth time.

Spring

Spring is here once again.  All the typical signs are evident:  the peepers are singing in the ditch, the crocus and daffodils are blooming the country roads are littered with dead skunks.  It baffles me that of all the beauty spring brings, the flattened bodies of skunks are one of the first signs.  I guess it doesn't pay to be one of the first ones out in spring.  On a brighter note, this morning there were rabbits grazing on the few green shoots of grass out by the garden.

Today it is in the low 60's and the early seeds sitting on the counter were calling my name.  So since the moon phase is almost right, the ground was not cold, the soil had just the right tilth and I could no longer resist the call to get my hands in the dirt, I planted some peas.  Just one short row.  I have plenty of seed, so I will probably have to plant again, but just working the soil and placing the plump, wrinkled seeds in the earth was wonderful.  Sun and rain and they will grow.

The early seedlings I started indoors are coming up.  The tiny necks of the plant poke through the soil and then lift their head and unfurl their first two leaves.  I always feel that life is affirmed when a seed sprouts and begins its life.  Grandpa and I bend over the young plants and marvel at how such a tiny seed will become a sturdy pepper plant or a ranging tomato that will take over the garden.  All is takes is someone to plant the seed and give it food, water and light.  People are a lot like that too.  All we need to do is give each other care and food, water and light.  Affirm life.

Is It Spring?

A lovely, mild winter.  Everyone is loving the warm, pleasant weather, but everything is out of kilter!  My spring bulbs, which are usually just beginning to peek out by this time, are 4 inches tall.  The birds are singing in the mornings as if it were spring.  And beyond any reason, I planted lettuce! This shirt-sleeve weather has me sorting seeds, puttering among the garden beds and getting out the peat pots to begin starting seeds for the garden.  But it is too early.  They say a big storm is on the way.  Perhaps, but just in case it misses us, I am going to plan for an early spring!

Spring Rain

There is nothing quite like a spring rain.  The grass turns green before my eyes.  The birds at the feeder this morning are slick and shiny with the cool rain, but they seem to be enjoying the moisture.  They take their time and reflect as they crack the seeds and eat.  The red bud has exploded in color all the more vibrant against the gray sky.  I find myself, cup of tea in hand, watching from the windows.  The illusion of being kept inside can last just a bit longer before I have to venture out umbrella in hand.

First Planting

St. Patrick's Day is traditionally the day for planting potatoes, but for me it was the day to plant lettuce.  The raised bed is cleaned off and new soil has been added.  Rich and black, it felt good to dig my hands into the moist ground and see the worms wiggling and at work enriching the soil.  It is almost a holy action.  The earth is still cool, but it is moist from the rains.  It always amazes me that such tiny seeds - and lettuce seeds are tiny - can grow to be so lovely and green and good. There will be much more planting when the ground warms, but for now I dig and sing.  I always sing David Mallett's Garden Song as I plant.  You can listen to the song at his website http://davidmallett.com/music/listen/.
Find a pot or a spot in your flower bed or yard and plant something this week.  Be a part of spring.

Spring at latitude 36°N

Sure Signs of Spring

• The daffodils are up and blooming
• We have 30 degree weather one day, and two days later it is 70 degrees!
• The oak trees have shed all of the brown leaves from last fall.
• The peepers are singing in the ditches and in the ponds.
• Where the pavement hasn't crumbled on the country roads, the potholes are multiplying.
• The marten house is up and open.  The scouts should be here any day.
• The trees all have fuzzy green tips.  One weeping willow looks like beautiful strings of green pearls.
• The skunks are up and out.  Dead skunks on the highway are a sure sign of spring in the country.
• The children are playing outside.
• I'm curled up in a chair on the porch catching the rays along side the cat.