The Inadvertent Gardener

Why is it that every year, I speak too soon about the whole end-of-winter business? I mean, seriously. Every year.

Only this year, I thought there might be something to it. You know, it being Spring today. And yesterday. And the day before.

I stumbled across this quote from a helpful National Weather Service meteorologist in an AP article this morning:

“Everyone is pretty tired of the snow but I think most people will agree these types of storms aren’t unusual in the spring,” National Weather Service meteorologist Steve Davis said. “These kinds of early-spring, late-winter storms are fairly common.”

Thanks, Steve Davis. Thanks for your insight into the fairly common problem of never. ending. snow.

For those of you who may be wondering why I’m including this long-winded, weather-whiny intro to the real meat of this post, it’s because I have plenty of time. I’m stuck in O’Hare right now, looking out at precipitation falling, waiting to board a plane that has already been delayed three times.

I’m doubly unhappy about the weather for more than just the normal reasons–on this trip, I managed to leave my winter coat at my parents’ house in Pennsylvania. I haven’t needed the stupid coat for most of my trip, and, well, just plum forgot it. So I’m facing my return to a never-ending winter (and a walk through the snow to board my plane outside) with an Old Navy hoodie.

Ah — another phone call from United. Another delay. This is real-time blogging, people! REAL-TIME WEATHER-BLOGGING.

The upshot of this is that for those of you who might be planning to meet me at the CSA Fair to pick up your swag (and, hopefully, support your local farmers), please accept my apologies — if I get there at all, I’m going to be woefully late. If you stop by and miss me, just leave a note in the comments — if there’s enough interest, I’ll arrange a meet-up sometime in the next two weeks in Iowa City. I will arrange it for a time when there are, in fact, no airplanes involved.

This picture?

That’s what’s happening outside my front door right this very minute.

I know this winter is going to end eventually, but seriously? It feels like I’m never going to see the garden again.

At BlogHer ’07, I attended a fabulous dinner with a group of other food bloggers, some of whom attended the conference and some of whom live in the area. At the table that night, we got to talking about my particular obsession with Lost. I told my table neighbors about my friend Betsy, who lives just up the street from me and whose basement (aka The Cave) sports a 9-foot projection TV system, and that she and her husband share my Lost obsession, so I planned to join them for as many minutes of Season 4 as I possibly could.

“I made the fish biscuits,” said Kat of KungFoodie, who was sitting to my right. “Well, they were sugar cookies, but I have the recipe on my blog. I even made a template.”

I don’t remember what I sputtered in response, but I’m sure it included the words “awesome,” “omigod,” and “that’s hi-LAR-ious.” If I’d had a laptop on me, I would have looked up the template right then and there.

It was all I could do to keep my secret for the next six months. I told Betsy back in August that I had a surprise awaiting the season premiere of Lost. And so, last Thursday night, I took my carefully made Fish Biscuits (which, I might report, are citrusy and delicious), and trudged through the snow up the street to Betsy’s for the first night back from a long, Lost-less era.

It was just the ticket for a snowy night during a winter so bitter even everyone I know who is from Iowa has been marveling. We ate our fish biscuits and stared at the nine-foot projection of an island that, even with weird creatures and enemies all around and a serious lack of a good bar and a shower, looked a heck of a lot better than the world outside The Cave.

And I’m just going to go ahead and admit it. When I showed Betsy the fish biscuits? I literally jumped up and down like I was four years old or something. I adore surprising people, and I had kept this under wraps for so long, I am probably lucky I didn’t cause myself some sort of bodily harm in the process of hopping around the kitchen.

I missed tonight’s episode, because I was off to see B.B. King with The Mint Killer. In the snow. We got eleven inches yesterday, and just as I was getting ready to leave for the show, I looked outside to find snow falling again. The forecast for the next four days? Snow flurries, snow showers, occasional snow and snowy snow.

Luckily, I have just enough dough in the freezer to make another fish biscuit or two. Because with this much snow, there’s something to be said for pretending I’m eating one on an island somewhere.

Photo credit for photo of me: Royce Chestnut

As I noted on Saturday, I did, in fact, make it to the garden fair. And, against many odds, located Prairie Robin as she and meandered in different directions through the central display area, which featured an awful lot of flower societies. There were societies of hosta lovers. Societies of lily lovers. Societies of people who love the trees and the black walnuts that fall out of them.

So, despite the odds, I did learn a few things about what to plant to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, and I learned a lot about bugs, and I met a new online friend in the real world, which is one of my very favorite things about blogging—I love it when the conversation skips off the web page and out into the real world.

I did not learn about The Kitchen Garden, and I missed the whole bulb session entirely, so I will be unable to school any of you in that particular facet of the event. But stay tuned in the next few weeks, because I will be providing thorough reporting on what I was in the vicinity to learn.

And I’m going to be honest here. I had designs to write more tonight, but as I rolled back into town on Sunday afternoon from an overnight away, the sky was just beginning to spit out some flurries, which turned into eight inches of snow that fell in five hours. Then, on Monday morning, we got hit with freezing rain and hail and lightning, all at the same time. Tonight? It’s back to snow, with six to 10 inches forecast for the overnight hours. And this, my fair readers, is causing me to go into paralysis when it comes to garden writing. I may deal with driving in the snow better than I used to, but that still doesn’t mean I’m ready to join the society of people who love the white stuff.

Not that I think all my readers set up a special calendar just to track my comings and goings (And, I might add, if you do, there is something wrong with you and you should get help immediately.) (Why are you still reading? Go get help!), but 50 minutes ago, I was supposed to be settling into my seat at the Kitchen Garden workshop, the first of the day at the Winter Gardening Fair.

Instead, I’m settled in at a coffee shop in Coralville, waiting out an inadvertent snowstorm.

I should not be surprised. This has been the snowiest winter since I arrived in Iowa, and I have been amazed at how my body has finally adjusted—when my car starts sliding on a road, instead of breaking out in a cold sweat and beginning to whimper, I stay relaxed and just let out a steady stream of words that would wilt a tomato plant.

I consider this progress.

So this morning, I got up with plans to get out of the house in plenty of time. Plenty of time, that is, for a dry and cold morning, which is what the weather forecasts all said it would be. There was a 30 percent chance of scattered light snow in the forecast, which, in my interpretation, is significantly different from the reality forecast, which goes something like this:

When you arrive at your car, you will have to brush two inches of snow off it, but the windshield will already be covered with a thin layer by the time you get all the way around the car because it is snowing so hard, and then you’re going to have about a 72.8 percent chance of your feet sliding out from under you because the snow is on top of a thin layer of ice oh yeah oh yeah, and even the trucks out on I-80 are going to be driving 45 mph because the roads are allegedly partly covered but more like mostly to completely covered and why are you even outside, Genie, why, oh why?

That is the forecast I would have liked to have read. I clearly need to find a new weather web site.

I did give it the college try. I got out on the highway, and felt fairly comfortable out there, cruising along at 43 mph, following a four-wheel-drive vehicle that was going fairly slowly, at peace with the fact that I was not going to make it to Kirkwood in time to make the first session, when suddenly it occurred to me that it was snowing even harder, that I couldn’t even really see out there, and that if I woke up on a weekday and the world outside looked like this, I would email my office and tell them I was working from home.

And thusly and therefore, it made not a single lick of sense that I was risking my car, life and limb (although I’ve never been able to figure out why you need your limb if you don’t have your life) to drive to a garden fair in weather that would ordinarily keep me from even opening my front door. And then it occurred to me that there was a chance the garden fair might even be delayed or canceled (according to my sources, which I have checked since getting my coffee, it is not, but that is neither here nor there), and I would feel even more stupid if I arrived and was the only idiot to show up in the snow. And then there it was. An exit. With easy access to a coffee shop.

So I got off the highway. And I’m thinking, now that this is the second year in a row that winter has given me the No-Garden-Fair-For-You smackdown, perhaps I should learn to leave well enough alone and quit registering for this thing.

UPDATE: Snow stopped. Roads cleared. I’m currently sitting at the Garden Fair learning about birds and butterflies with Prairie Robin. Rock on.