Waiting for Spring

What a difference a month makes. The garden that was buried in snow a short time ago is now visible and even has the first plantings in it, onions and leeks and a few early lettuce plants. It's hard to believe how fast the snow goes once it starts to melt. The biggest problem now seems to be keeping the varmints off the veggies. The winter lettuce, seeds sown in the fall to give us the first taste of green in the spring, was taken by starlings as soon as the first leaves appeared. The groundhog has been around, eyeing the spinach and who can blame her. In the urban landscape there's little enough for a ground hog to eat. I try to discourage her, however. As sympathetic as I am, it's my family I'm trying to feed here. I've got a kid's pinwheel, a nice shiny one, that turns in the wind, and the motion and the flashes of light seem to work somewhat to make her and the birds a little nervous about getting too close. I hope they don't get too accustomed to it before I get the netting up.

Waiting for Spring

The picture is my garden, under about eight feet of snow. Well, six feet anyway. It's hard to imagine there will ever be plants growing there. There are some, waiting, living on my windowsills for now, reaching for the light, dreaming as I do, of warmth and sunshine. It's been a long winter. I think it snowed every day for most of it and has been miserably cold. Of course, everyone says this is very unusual. I've never been anywhere where people said, "Oh, yeah, this is what the weather is usually like this time of year."

The arrival of the seed catalogues in January is always hopeful. One can imagine, once they come, that there will be spring, someday. The pictures are bright, the plants perfect in every way, not a broken leaf, not a bug, no sign of stress or disease. The promise is plain--big, round, red tomatoes, perfect pansies, lilacs from the dead land. The garden in real life never quite lives up to the advance publicity, but what ever does. We live on dreams a lot.

They're promising warmer weather tomorrow. "They", the weather guys on TV, have to be right sometimes, don't they?