Way too cold. Too wet. And what is it with these recent snow flurries? Have we time-travelled and now are living inside a giant snow globe?
I must celebrate the yellow daffodils. What wonderful spots of “sunshine” they provide to us on these grey days. I braved the slippery steep slopes to gather up some blooms for my home from my urban apple orchard that is at the bottom of my hillside garden. Well worth the effort and of course I had to recite Wordsworth’s lines as I arranged the blooms. Do our children even know any more these springtime poems? Perhaps they have their own turgid phrases or on-line visuals for this season.
It is a season that holds the cold, lack of light of winter, and the softer air and fuller light of summer. Sometimes these contrasts happen within just one day. More often we are blasted by the cold for what seems forever, and then the sun breaks through the greyness, and we rush to put our faces into that light. Also our backs.
Recently I was so excited to have a few hours in my garden cleaning up the winter detritus, cutting back last year’s disheveled growth, and feeling so ready to be back in the garden. I made lists after dinner of all that I wanted to do the next day. Before sleep descended, my thoughts wandered over all the nooks and crannies of my garden. I awoke to a dense and unexpected snow flurry/storm. Sigh …
March is a challenge. However, we should remind ourselves about the value of a garden in our lives. No, I am not speaking about how adding a patio or a new-fangled barbecue center will bring added resale value to our homes. Rather it is the calming value. Yes, seasons do impede with their capriciousness, but the slow, on-going march of the seasons inform our lives.
We have a place that uses all our senses. Now we can smell the dampness. We feel the prick of the thorns as we prune our roses. The few bits of sunshine illuminate the colors of the fattening buds or emphasize the deep sheen on an evergreen fern. If you open your senses to the garden, you will never feel lonely. Suddenly, because you have been quietly working on your projects, the screeching caw of the crows will bring a smile. And then you will hear the softer warblings of other birds. And soon we will be planting our food crops, with dreams of the fresh taste of our summer and fall harvests.
Lee Neff, local gardener extraordinaire, recently wrote a beautiful essay in the Northwest Horticulture Society (NHS) Bulletin. If you are not a member of this organization, I would strongly urge you to join. They have so many classes, lectures, plant sales, and opportunities to be involved with informed and active gardeners.
In Lee’s essay she introduced me to her use of plastic gutters for starting seeds. This is brilliant! Instead of putting seeds into hundreds of small pots, which as she states is “mind-numbing”, she fills a 5-foot gutter with damp potting soil and compost. That just takes a few minutes. Then she seeds the gutter. That takes just a few minutes. When the time comes to plant the seedlings in the garden, they easily slide out of the gutter into a small trench.
Yes, her food garden is extensive, so the 5-foot length is appropriate for her scale. But surely we can make shorter lengths of gutter for our urban scale. I love this idea for I have almost no patience for starting seeds in a gazillion pots in the warmth of my furnace/laundry room. A few well-positioned gutters just seems so very, very smart and so much easier to keep damp as the seeds begin their germination.
Finally, what to do with the too many seeds that we always have. It feels unseemly to just throw them away and most of our friends have their own excesses. Last year I bought a supply of coin envelopes, and now I parse out my seeds into these envelopes and write the seed company name and the variety on the envelope. Some of my friends are intrigued by my selections and like to have just a few seeds to try out.
With the left-over packets, I distribute them to the Queen Anne Helpline or the Ballard Food Bank. Perhaps their clients will not have a place for a full tilt vegetable garden, but the joy that will come with the blooming of a gigantic sunflower that they have planted nearby will be something to behold. Or just three seeds for some zucchini plants close by. Perhaps a pumpkin patch. As always, seeds bring that powerful sense of renewal and hope.
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