Spring Prep
Getting Lined Up For Summer Gardening
It’s beginning to look a lot like springtime, with daffodils blooming, trees leafing out, and grass telling me that it will soon be time to bring out the mower.
While dealing with propane lines and water leaks at the cottage, there appeared a moose, a pair of eagles, some ducks and geese, and the sounds of barking dogs upriver. Summer furniture is back on the deck and the turf torn up by winter plowing has been tamped back down in hopes it will take hold and spare the need to reseed the lawn.
At home in Bristol, between bouts of rain, we have been clearing fallen branches, pruning dead limbs, and pulling out bittersweet, stacking it for trips to the brush pile below the transfer station. There also was finally time to put together the new composting tumbler distributed by the Lakes Region Planning Board through a grant to reduce food waste. Assembling the Jora Composter is supposed to take from 40 to 70 minutes but, despite having watched Bill Corliss put one together during the April 23 training session, and refreshing my memory of the process by watching a video demonstration, it took all afternoon for Lee and me set the beast up. That was partly due to the need to go to the hardware store for new wrenches, since mine were residing up north at the cottage shed.
Meanwhile, the food waste storage container we had ordered arrived, so we could begin accumulating the material destined for the composter. The task ahead is to reconfigure our raised beds and fill with new and old soil so they are ready for transplanted seedlings that have reached the state where they need to be “hardened” against the outside temperatures and put into the ground.
Lee has grown skeptical of my gardening skills, despite my oft-repeated declaration that, in another life, I’d like to be a gardener. While I’ve been helpful in getting the garden planted in the past, it usually falls to her to weed and tend the plants while I focus on other things. My most successful garden was the one I planted while working at Upper Valley Press in Vermont, where the weeds grew wild but somehow the crop was bountiful. I dubbed it “weed gardening” and attributed its success to the weeds holding in the moisture and sheltering the vegetables from the hot summer sun. Our carefully tended and weeded gardens have never produced as well as that one did with very little care.
Of course, with a state forest right behind our home, the garden has proven attractive to the deer and smaller animals that wander into the yard. I was infuriated to find that, just as our peas were ready for harvesting one year, the plants were nipped off just above the ground, with plentiful deer tracks throughout the garden.
That is why this year, after having vowed to do it for the last two years, I intend to put a fence around the garden to help keep (most of) the animals out. Lee thinks the likelihood that I’ll do it this year — or even get around to building new raised beds — is slim. It makes me more determined than ever to prove her wrong, especially now that we will (theoretically) have fresh compost to fortify the soil.
The weather plays a large role in how much gets done. It’s difficult to work outside when it’s pouring rain, and I’ve never been one to enjoy doing tasks when it’s too cold. That aversion to frozen hands dates back to helping my father work on his saw rig when it broke down and I had to hand icy cold wrenches to him while he tinkered so he would be able to cut wood for the stove. Or later when my hands would become numb while repairing a broken horse fence.
It definitely was not warm enough on May 2 to take part in National Naked Gardening Day.
Then there is the tricky art of balancing work time and writing time. (Writing time is never work time for me, even if it’s a story I’m not particularly interested in writing about.) It is important to fit writing time into every day, but accomplishing that while also fitting in yard work and other necessary tasks around the weather, family obligations, and social commitments is not easy. The list of things to do always exceeds the amount of time available in a day.
It helps that I now wake with the sun. During my college years, I rarely went to bed before 2 a.m. (As Joost van Nispen often announced around midnight, “The night is but a puppy” at that hour.) That meant sleeping until around noon and choosing my classes to avoid early-morning commitments. These days, I’m up early enough on some days to watch the sun rise, and, consequently, I’m usually in bed by 10 p.m.
I need to use care in allocating time right now because this also is the brief period before the biting insects are out in force. Once they appear, working outside loses much of its appeal. Dealing with black flies is almost as difficult as dealing with frozen fingers.
Still, spring remains my favorite month. Watching nature come alive is one of the great joys of existence.