The Inadvertent Gardener

It’s one thing not to clean up your garden for the winter, but leaving the hanging basket up on your front porch with a dead plant for several months in a row? That’s crazy talk. Or crazy doing.

Whatever it is called, I did it. There was a point in the winter when I just decided that the dead plants looked like some kind of cool, structural, khaki plant sculpture. Plus, there was that whole issue of if I spent any time outside trying to take down the basket, my fingers would freeze off, which would make it very difficult to type this blog. And then you would have nothing to read.

Do you see how I do what I do for the people? I thought so.

But now it is spring, even though it snowed yesterday in Cedar Rapids, which made my right eye twitch uncontrollably for half an hour and made me huddle in the corner muttering, “Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.” Then that all stopped and I went about my afternoon.

Before all that, though, and over the weekend, I realized it was beyond time to actually take down the basket and replace the dead plant with something more, you know, springy. And alive.

Although I have professed my love for the flowering trees of D.C. (and, oh yes, that does include the cherry blossoms), I’ve got to admit – I never spent much time when I lived there thinking about their symbolism.

I mean, the cherry trees? To me, they symbolized the hurray of Spring, and they symbolized that the traffic around the Tidal Basin was about to grind to a halt, and they usually symbolized we were about to get a raw, wet, nasty day, generally timed to directly coincide with the National Cherry Blossom Festival’s long-planned parade, that would knock all the delicate blossoms to the ground as if they were snowflakes.

So I perked up, last May during my visit to the San Francisco Botanical Garden, when Gordon Wilson, the docent leading my walking tour, started explaining what the cherry blossoms meant to the Japanese.

“They used them to indicate when to start the rice seed,” he said. “When the trees bloomed, it meant a period of warm weather was coming.”

According to Gordon, the next step in the process came after a specific iris (and although I was taking notes, I didn’t get the name of this one) bloomed as well. That indicated a period of wet weather would be coming soon, so that’s when the rice farmers would plant their crop.

See, this is the kind of gardening marker I can get behind. When this very visible thing happens, start the seed. When this very visible thing happens, plant the seedling. This doesn’t require hoping that the almanac is going to hit the last frost date accurately this year, or require searching old blog posts and weather.com for indicators of when the weather might turn.

Just blossom: start. Blossom: plant. Very simple, and beautiful, to boot.

I did, after my extended stay at O’Hare, finally arrive home over the weekend. I’d been gone for 12 days on what felt like the longest business trip of my life, including stops in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia.

When I left Iowa, the snow had indeed begun to melt, but was still shoulder-high and causing trouble. I returned to a mostly snow-free landscape, although the disappearance of the white has left Iowa khaki-dreary—no blossoms, no green grass, no growth. This happens every year—there’s always a period of time between winter and spring (and by spring, I’m not talking about the post-equinox season, but the actual reappearance of color) when the landscape offers nothing to the eye other than wide swaths of blandness.

In my backyard, a small patch of snow survived in an area of the yard that’s shady most of the day. But the garden is, once again, uncovered, and what a mess it is, although it’s a mess that’s going to feed the garden nicely once the growing season starts up in earnest. Most of the bed is matted with leaves and decaying plants that I never pulled up before the snow brought any hope of that abruptly to an end, and I think I can probably just turn that stuff under so last year’s plants and leaves give this year’s plants a little bit of boost.

But on one end of the garden, garlic is already sprouting through the layer of mulch I put down when I planted it last fall, and when I crouched down to take a look, I noticed something particularly exciting. Not only is the garlic getting its grow on, but there are some baby spinach leaves coming up out of the ground.

I suspect my poor gardening practice of letting the spinach bolt and not dealing with it in a timely fashion has resulted in some inadvertent reseeding, and that means I’m all set up for fresh greens without any work on my part whatsoever.

Rock on.

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.

First. Day. Of. Spring.

Do you know what this means, people? It means we all survived winter. Finally. We survived it.

I’m considering planting something this weekend, just for the heck of it, even though it’s still too early in Iowa and there’s snow in the forecast for Saturday morning and later next week. Oh yes. Spring snow.

So be it. At this point, what harm is there in a little more of the white stuff? The season has changed, and winter did not beat me. That’s all, at this point, that I care about.

Oh, and no. That photo was taken recently, but was not taken in Iowa. You can tell this because there is no snow. Also there are flowers. These two conditions do not equal Iowa. They do, however, equal southwestern Oregon. More on that later.